Dougsbookblog

The days of sunshine and hunting big cats

2012-01-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

There's a black and white picture I meant to upload for this blog, but it seems to have vanished somewhere so I'll try to describe it. At the top, on a high stone plinth, stands a tall, shirt-sleeved young man with a vaguely aristocratic air and floppy fair hair that hangs over his eyes. He's holding what looks like a lead, which in turn is attached to a truly enormous lion who lies sleeping with his great maned head pillowed by paws the size of beach balls. In front of the plinth is a slightly rougher character also in shirt sleeves, but with dark hair, a dodgy moustache and an air of mischief in his eyes.

The one with the dodgy moustache is me, aged about 27, and the chap at the back is my friend and then journalistic jedi apprentice, Benjie. The picture was taken in the 80s, when we still had proper summers, and reminds me of the carefree days of local newspapers. Benjie was fascinated by the recurring sightings of 'big cats' and I'd promised that I'd find him one, so one day off we went into the blue, safe in the knowledge that nobody would mind as long as we came back with a story. Then, as now, I put such sightings on a par with alien kidnappings and Scotland World Cup qualification, events so unlikely as to be preposterous, but I knew I'd find a big cat at fascinating Monteith's Aisle, otherwise known as the Douglas Mausoleum (you can see some excellent pictures here), which stands on Lilliardsedge, north of Jedburgh. The Aisle houses the tomb of General Sir Thomas Monteath Douglas, 1787-1868, who now lies forever beneath a domed roof pierced with stars, with a tall angel at his head and feet. Sandstone lions, one asleep and the other awake, guard the entrance.

Benjie very sensibly left journalism to become a merchant banker in London, where he now doubles as the Makar or poet in residence to the City. I loved working for the local papers in Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose and Gala, because you were in a unique position at the very heart of the community and if you knew what you were doing you could get a story out of just about anything. You never worked nine to five, you spent most Saturdays on a muddy touchline, and you never knew what you were doing from one day to the next.

Occasionally reporters from 'the nationals', hoary, grizzled creatures who smoked too much and spent most of their time in the pub working out how to maximise their expenses, would descend on your patch. They'd pick your brains, file their stories and if you were lucky buy you a pint. Their one universal piece of advice was 'stay where you are, son. Better off in the locals'. Of course, they were right, national papers are just one long grind of constant pressure, tight deadlines and demands for more and better stories, punctuated by the occasional bollocking when you get something wrong. But there's also a magic to them, an illusory glory that meant the advice just had to be ignored. I spent longer in nationals (Scottish variety) than in local papers, but my fondest memories are not of great scoops, or incredible news days like 9/11 or Dunblane, but of days like the one with Benjie, covering the unchanging rituals of the Jethart festival, or delivering competition prizes up in the Cheviots on a rutted one-way track that started in Scotland and ended somewhere in England.

The skeleton in my cupboard

2012-01-19T00:55:00.000-08:00

Although I've published four historical novels and a thriller, I keep banging on in these blogs about my, as yet unpublished, crime books. There are a few reasons for that. I think Brothers in Arms and War Games are as good as any of my other books. They were fun to write, because there was no pressure. I learned a lot from them that I was able to inject into the thrillers. And the main protagonist is the only one of my characters who actually talked to me.

It's true. When I finished the first draft of The Emperor's Elephant, the book that would become Caligula and Claudius, I had no idea where to go next. I knew it was good, but not quite good enough, but I didn't have the knowledge or experience to rewrite it. So what should I do? The obvious answer was write another book. I can't remember whether I decided it should be a crime novel, or whether he started creating himself in my head, but I remember getting up in the middle of the night to write everything down. The result was a book in the first person, told with a kind of Chandleresque commentary running through it. I read them again the other day when I finished the latest rewrite of Avenger of Rome, and they felt fresh and new. Who knows if, when or how they'll be published, but I think they will. The people who inhabit them are real to me and I think they deserve to be introduced to a wider audience.

The lead character is a Falklands War veteran with a special talent and a dirty secret, a wife with problems of her own, and nowhere to run when the members of his old platoon start getting knocked off one by one.

I thought I'd give you a taste. Here's a flavour of Brothers in Arms.

CHAPTER 1

Failure isn’t unusual in my line of work. It’s not an exact science. Sometimes the dead call out to me, sometimes they don’t.

We stood among wet heather on a patch of bare hillside overlooking a quarry where a canary-yellow earthmover worked steadily to shift rocks and mud. My companion was silent, but I knew what he was thinking. This hill was indistinguishable from the others we had investigated. The quarry could have been the same quarry. Why should he believe me this time?

‘She’s here.’

‘What?’

‘I said she’s here,’ louder this time, raising my voice above the howl of the wind and the machine-gun rattle of rain against Gore-Tex.

The Scots have a word for this weather. Dreich. But even it struggled to convey the dull, impenetrable leaden grey of an April afternoon when the rain came off the hills horizontally and so thick you could catch salmon in it. I stamped my feet to try to get some feeling back into them, but only succeeded in splashing mud over the top of my newly-acquired green wellies - the kind I always associate with people called Jeremy who slaughter grouse for fun. My companion gave me a look I’d come to recognise over the years. The sort of look you keep for the man with the manic twitch who sits down next to you on the train. I gave him what passed for a reassuring smile. I always feel vaguely guilty about letting people down, especially people like Assistant Chief Constable Johnny Gordon, who aren’t in it for the glory and who have put their faith in me. Most people question what I do; I’ve learned to live with that, but I don’t have to like it. I also resent the knowing ‘I told you so’ smirks on the faces of the sergeants and the constables who didn’t want me here in the first place. Bastards.

It hadn’t been a murder investigation at first. Only missing persons. An anonymous middle-aged conwoman who’d booked into a back street bed and breakfast had walked out without paying the bill. So what’s new? The B&B owner was brassed off and not a little let down. She may have been a little frayed around the edges and she liked a bit too much of the sauce, but Jennifer Doyle had seemed a nice lady, who made pleasant conversation and complimented the owner’s missus on her cooking. She just didn’t seem the type. But you live and learn.

A few days later they found the blood soaked towel down a drain in the guest house car park and the missing woman’s suitcase in a nearby builders’ skip.

The disappearance was mysterious enough to make front page news for a while, but, as the weeks passed, the investigation slipped down the priority list until it fell off the bottom. But not for Johnny Gordon. Johnny is one of your old-fashioned cops who doesn’t like loose ends and is more interested in people than targets. With retirement staring him in the face, giving up wasn’t an option. So he called me.

In other circumstances, I would have been flattered - any business is good business, right? In this case I should have run a mile.

I looked around at what little was visible through the smears of squall sweeping down the valley on a sharp east wind. When people think of Scotland, they see the saw-toothed skyline of the Cairngorms or the majestic grandeur of the Trossachs. This was different. The Cheviot Hills can’t match the Highlands for scale, but their bleak, tree-stripped heights and spectre-shadowed valleys have a brooding aura that, in certain lights, can be ominous in the truest sense of the word. They were ominous now. The electricity of Jennifer’s presence was everywhere around me on the hill. I could feel the pulse of it through my body from the soles of my feet and it pounded in my brain like a roadman’s jackhammer. But there was something else, too. Something I didn’t fully understand. A sense of terrible foreboding that filled the air like a thunder cloud and was so obvious I wondered why the others couldn’t feel it.

A shout echoed around the quarry and the digger driver cut his engine.

‘They’ve found something.’ Johnny’s voice betrayed his relief. He moved off downhill, his boots squelching noisily in the damp peat. I stayed where I was.

My hand strayed to the round piece of metal deep in my pocket, worn smooth by the touch of her fingers so that the symbols on the surface were barely visible. I’d recognised that piece of metal the moment I’d seen it because I have one that’s just about identical at home. It was easy to imagine her rubbing obsessively at the silvery cupronickel as she sat in front of the fire in the drab little front room of the last place she would call home. In its own mysterious way, that little piece of metal had led me here. I took no joy in being proved right. Success would not make Jennifer Doyle’s heart beat even one more time, or fill her lungs with a single breath. All the same, I felt that familiar old flutter of relief. It hadn’t deserted me.

Call it a gift. Call it a curse. I’ve had it since I was ten years old.

The white-suited forensics officers worked steadily in the quarry below. There was no urgency in the way they moved. Why should there be? Jennifer Doyle wasn’t going anywhere. They picked their way meticulously over the ground, photographing anything that might be evidence, and then carefully bagging it. Half an hour passed before Johnny Gordon struggled his way back up the hill towards me. I could hear him swearing under his breath.

‘The animal,’ he spat, the hot blood of his anger mottling his face purple.

‘What is it?’ I had been expecting thanks or at least appreciation, but not this. Gordon had led a dozen murder investigations and seen a hundred bodies. He had an old-time copper’s acceptance of death, but what he had seen down in the quarry had shocked even him.

‘Is this some kind of fucking joke?’ The hand he held out to me shook, so it was difficult at first to see what was in the little plastic evidence bag. Then he thrust it in my face. I couldn’t read everything that was on the soggy, blood-smeared, once-white business card, but then I didn’t have to. It was mine.

Thought for the Day

2012-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

I haven't gone away, I've just been very busy with my rewrite of Avenger of Rome. I will write a new blog soon and it WILL be interesting!

Roamin' with the Romans

2011-12-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

I took the chance during the countdown to Christmas to do something I'd always planned; walk at least part of Dere Street, the Roman road between the Scottish border and the fortress at Trimontium. My wife dropped me off at Jedfoot, close to where the road crosses the river Teviot and I set off up what looked like a muddy farm track that headed directly south towards the Cheviot Hills.

The legionary marching camp at Pennymuir in the Cheviots is where I made my first real connection with the Romans as a 16-year-old labourer on a Youth Opportunities Scheme. Every morning during the summer of 1972 I'd be packed off in a smelly old van driven by Taff, the Arnhem veteran, and put to work by Jock, the tall, wiry foreman of the labouring gang. The camp had been ploughed up by the Forestry Commission to plant trees and our job was to turn the peat back into its original position in the three foot furrows. The turf banks the Romans created at Pennymuir to protect their camp are still there and it's always struck me that using my mattock and shovel to cut the peat into manageable chunks, I was doing exactly what the legionaries would have done to create the place in 80AD or thereabouts.

Dere Street begins in York and continues as far north as Edinburgh, probably following the line of march of governor Julius Agricola's invading force. Most of it now lies under the A1 and A68 trunk roads, but there are sections between Pennymuir and Jedfoot which still exist more or less as they did when it was built, with the ditches and banks still visible and a carriageway as much as twelve paces wide. It's what we call 'clarty' underfoot, but wonderfully atmospheric and you can imagine yourself meeting a marching century round every corner. Look back north from any rise and the road heads arrow straight for the triple peak of the Eildon Hills which gave Trimontium its name. Agricola's cavalry would have scouted this route ahead of the main army and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out the reaction of the locals to the arrival of the armoured might of Rome.

I walked out about five miles to Cappuck, where there was a permanent Roman cavalry station as well as at least four marching camps. The signal station was built by the Twentieth, the legion which was home to my character Valerius, and we know at least two of the men who were stationed there. Aulus Julius Severus, a tribune of the Gaestetae auxiliary cavalry, and Gaius Quintius Severus, who commanded the First Cohort of the Faithful Vardulli, left altar stones which are now built into the fabric of Jedburgh Abbey, and have incredibly survived two thousand years and the ravages of half a dozen more invading armies.

Look carefully and you can just see the peaks of the Eildons

The Romans have still left their mark

You can just imagine the legions marching north

Cappuck: these fields would once have thronged with infantry and cavalry

From Cappuck, I walked back over the hill to Jedburgh, for a pint at the Tavern with my mate Iain and brother in law Jimmy, and a perfect end to the day.

These boots were made for walking

2011-12-18T11:22:00.000-08:00

Today I took my old walking boots for a last wander through the Ochil Hills between Sheriffmuir and Dumyat before they're put out to grass. It was a poignant occasion, because I've had them for fifteen years and they've been to the top of Mont Blanc. Not I hasten to add with me in them, but with their original owner, my late and still sorely missed friend and colleague Tim Harper.

Tim sold me them for a tenner sometime around 1996. He was an incredible character who threw himself into everything he did with huge enthusiasm, whether it was his job as chief sub of the Daily Record, climbing an alp or casting a fly at a rising trout. The seven mile walk I did wouldn't even have counted as a stroll to a man who could do two Munros before breakfast and still be looking for more at the end of a ten hour day in the hills.

He died on the way down from an ice climb on Ben Nevis in early 2001. Totally professional in everything he did, the rescuers who recovered his body praised his equipment and preparation. It was just one of those things: an ice shelf that gave way beneath his feet.

I never put those boots on without thinking of him, but they've done their bit and into the cupboard they'll go. Next year I plan to get back into the hills properly, so Santa will be bringing a pair of cracking new boots and an all-weather jacket. It was a fantastic day for a walk, with frost on the ground, the air scalpel sharp and crystal clear and the Trossachs a glorious saw-toothed wall of white in the distance. I saw thrushes and redwings by the hundred in the woods, flocks of bullfinches, chaffinches, great tits and blue tits, and dozens of blackbirds in the hedgerows making the most of the last of the berries. When I reached the highest point on the moor I sat on what looked like an old burial mound and watched a falconer flying an eagle or a big hawk through my binoculars. It followed him around like a dog while he probed the ground with some kind of electronic gizmo that emitted high-pitched sounds, presumably to spook the rabbits below. Tim would have loved it.

Every foot of the ground I walked over has been touched by history. Great armies roamed these hills during the battle of Sheriffmuir. Dumyat was the fortress of the Maetae, the warlike tribe who had to be bought off by the Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, during his invasion of Scotland. Signs of habitation dot the bleak landscape, whether it's the ruins of old shepherd's cottages and field boundaries or the moss-covered stumps of standing stones above intriguing earth barrows. On the way back down I pondered over what came to be Bridge of Allan would have looked like two thousand years ago. I suspect that the focus of habitation would have been the shelf of land occupied by the rich folks of Upper Bridge of Allan these days. It would have looked out over an incredibly rich and diverse flood plain where the Forth, Teith and Allan rivers meet. The waters would have been filled with salmon and trout, and the marshes with waterfowl. Otter would have provided furs and there would have been deer and wild boar aplenty in the woods on the hills around. If ancient life was ever idyllic, then this was one of the best places in Scotland to be.

None of that would have interested Tim much. The past didn't draw him as it does me. He was that fascinating paradox: a man who lived for the future, but managed to treat every day as if it was his last. There's a message there somewhere that I'll carry into the New Year with me.

As Private Fraser would say: We're all doomed!

2011-12-17T04:42:00.000-08:00

Today my blog celebrates its fourth anniversary. When I started it on December 17, 2007, I had very little idea what a blog was and, cliched though it sounds, the world was a very different place.

My motivation was to give people, particularly unpublished writers, an insight into what it felt like during the countdown to my first book, in all its excitement, exhilaration and downright terror. It pledged to be a warts and all account, but, of course, it hasn't been entirely transparent; there are some inner fears and conflicts you have to keep to yourself for your own sanity. Yet looking back over 166 posts and four years, it pretty much sums up my life as it has been lived.

The highs have been the books and their launches, the support of my family, the reacquaintance with old friends and the making of new ones: finding a courage and confidence I didn't know I had to walk away from a perfectly good job into an uncertain, but always exciting future. There are more books on the way and the ideas keep coming. The lows? The usual mundane stuff about surviving until the next pay cheque comes through. An occasional feeling of aloneness that is more imagined than real.

They have been four momentous years, but the next four promise to be more momentous still, and for all the wrong reasons. When I look at the world today compared to that day in 2007, the future is filled with threats. Unemployment as I write is the highest for 17 years, particularly among the young, and it will continue to rise, possibly even to Great Depression levels. The lost generation will not just be a convenient political soundbite, but a reality.

Polarisation between left and right, rich and poor, and north and south has never been greater in my lifetime. Take a look at political forums or the comments on national newspaper stories and the language is ever more extremist. If you listen carefully, even at the highest levels, you can hear the sound of sabres rattling. A week ago, a Conservative MP talked about France using EU laws as "an Exocet aimed at the heart of the City", a deliberate and inflammatory harking back to the Falklands War. Yesterday, I heard a steely-eyed government minister describe with relish how Typhoons and helicopter gunships will be deployed above London during the Olympic Games at the same time as thirteen and a half thousand British soldiers are helping 'secure' the event. Why not go the whole hog and put a Challenger tank on every street corner? It will certainly come in handy when the inevitable riots start as the dispossessed see the fruits of their sacrifice go up in smoke in a multi-million pound fireworks display.

On the one hand we have an immature, elitist cabal who think it's a good idea to target chemotherapy patients for benefit cuts, on the other a leaderless, demoralised sham of an Opposition whose toothlessness opens the way for the champagne socialists controlling the unions to start throwing their weight around. The only good thing about our political system is that one way or the other the Opposition has the ability to expose and occasionally curb the worst lunacies of the lot in power. If there is no opposition where does that leave us? In Scotland, Labour is about to elect a leader who will guarantee Alex Salmond's place as First Minister for as long as he chooses. At the same time, support for independence grows, not because there's a huge appetite to break up the UK, but because the alien, fundamentally selfish, political philosophy currently in vogue in the south is anathema to most Scots. The irony is that we've never needed unity and mutual economic support more.

Time to stop when a blog turns into a rant, but I, like, I suspect, most of the disempowered Centre, am angry and fearful. I make one last prediction. The thing that brings it to a head will be the lack of understanding or genuine care amongst the current incumbents of Downing Street. Understanding of the real terror when you don't know where the next mortgage payment is coming from and your home is drowning in negative equity. Understanding of what it's like to graduate with a good degree and a one in ten thousand chance of getting to use it. Understanding that, when the world is falling apart, people don't need lectures or more pain, they need hope.

Oh, yes, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers.

The fork in the road

2011-12-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

Authors spend a lot of time considering What if? or what I think of as the fork in the road. Take the left fork and you might buy the winning lottery ticket, take the right and your car might be squashed flat by a tank transporter. That kind of thing. It can be a matter of choice or chance, or maybe even someone else's arbitrary decision.

I found myself asking the What if? question the other night when I watched a TV programme called The Hudson's Bay Boys. In it, the BBC had brought together five Scots who had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in the 60s,70s and 80s. The HBC actively sought out young Scots men to run their remote Arctic Circle stores from the 1800s to the 1980s, and thousands made their way across the Atlantic. It was a fascinating story of young men - teenagers - journeying from their homes in Selkirk, St Andrews, Dumfries and the Shetlands to seek out adventure and a new life in one of the harshest localities on earth.

I think this is a remarkably tidy and well kept store at the
height of summer. It would be very different in the winter

While their contemporaries worked 9-5 in mills and offices, they ran the isolated company stores, traded for furs with their Inuit customers and hunted seals and caribou in temperatures that sometimes fell to minus 50. Before they reached their twenties they had become key members of the almost completely isolated communities they served. In one clip, Jim, the Shetlander, told how he'd pulled teeth, delivered babies and wept as he remembered the only person he couldn't save using his self-taught medical skills. They integrated in a remarkable way with the Inuit people; four out of the five had married local girls and now had children and grandchildren. The biggest upheaval in all their lives had been the celebrity sponsored anti-fur protests of the 70s and 80s. When Brigitte Bardot posed with a doe-eyed, fluffy white seal pup nobody worried about the native Inuit as the trade price of a sealskin crashed from 34 dollars a pelt to eight dollars and their economy collapsed, threatening the whole Inuit way of life.

The reason I asked myself What if? is that in 1972 I answered an advert in The Scotsman asking for young adventurous men to apply to join the Hudsons Bay Company, and, about the time I was turning turf in a Roman camp in the Cheviot Hills, went up to Edinburgh for an interview. I shudder to think what kind of weedy specimen I looked to the interviewers at 16 years old, but what if I'd got the job? My life would have turned out entirely differently and I'd be a different person now. Would I have written books? Maybe I would have written them a lot earlier, because there wasn't a lot to do during the eternal winter nights apart from read, write and listen to the radio. I like to think that I would have miraculously acquired the DIY skills that elude me today, not fainted during a difficult birth and yanked out a molar without a qualm. I suspect the reality would have been very different

I don't envy them, much, though four out of the five live remarkably fulfilled lives. The welcome they received from people they hadn't seen for twenty years was a testament to their achievements, but their youth was a desperately hard existence and for every success there would have been many failures.

Still, you can't help thinking: What if?

Take a walk on the wild side

2011-11-27T08:16:00.000-08:00

A nice day for getting the wellies out and heading up to the woods behind the old hill fort where the king's grave is. Beautiful sunny afternoon with a touch of winter in the air, but the wellies were definitely a necessity thanks to the mountain bike vandals who've churned all the paths into a muddy swamp.

This is a great time of the year for seeing things that are a little different. A flock of bullfinches feasting on the seeds among the dead nettles; long-tailed tits hanging upside down from the branches of a silver birch; woodcock and snipe exploding out of the flattened bracken and whipping away low and fast like mini-Meschersmitts. And of course, there are the old favourites; the pheasants hiding away from the guns on the estate over the other side of the river; an enormous buzzard that flapped majestically away accompanied by an escort of shrieking crows; the big roe deer that I caught sight of bounding down the hill through the trees that naturally didn't linger long enough to get a decent picture of.

At least the fungus stayed still long enough for a picture

The Allan was in full spate, but no salmon to be seen

Dunblane Cathedral in the distance from the hilltop

Look close enough and you might see the roe deer

The walk reminded me that I haven't been getting out enough lately. Hopefully that will change this week when I reach the end of the first draft of The Isis Covenant, but the editor's rewrite of Avenger of Rome is just around the corner, so we'll see.

Something's cooking

2011-11-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

Take forty odd talented creative types, put them in a room for two days, add a soupcon of direction, a pinch of encouragement and stir occasionally and what do you get? Well, a lot of laughs and mad ideas for starters, but to really get the best out of this dish you have to allow it to simmer for another five or six months.

That, in a cooking pot, was 360 Narratives, the two day get together I attended at the Barcelo Hotel in Stirling, hosted by the super-efficient Claire and Fiona from Playwrights' Studio Scotland, with a little help from Creative Scotland, and brilliantly marshalled by film maker Grant Keir. The idea was to bring people together from across the arts spectrum and get them to think about working together to create new and innovative projects. This is just the first step, with a residency to follow next March when the writers, screenwriters, playwrights, graphic novel designers and games developers whose projects have the most potential will be given the time and support to work together to begin making them a reality. The brilliant Phil Parker got the ball rolling with a clarion call to find a place in the new creative universe that's opening up all around, and urging people to collaborate with whoever was needed to make it work. Short films that can make a fortune on the internet, simple games that hit the right spot, interactive e-books that cross the divide between film, game and novel, films that can be created using a mobile phone. There's a market for them all. I'd never thought of any of them, but when he told his audience 'Story is the heart of everything' I realised that new doors are opening for writers everywhere.

I met some wonderful people, had my mind opened up to other ways of looking at the writing world, and was enthused, invigorated and finally left completely exhausted after two days of brainstorming that left most of us looking like wet dishrags, but feeling as if we'd really achieved something. When I started, I had no idea I was going to end up standing in front of about fifty people singing a folk song about a mad-eyed Manga warrior dying in a hospital to the tune of Hotel California (I can still hear it, make it go away). The fact that it took the place by storm and won the Genre, Location, Platform pitching competition was all down to my talented scratch team of Tracey, Alton, Fiona and Jessie, who entered wholeheartedly into creating something from nothing in twenty minutes and then had what it took to make it work (Having just seen the video, please excuse the poetic licence). Every one a trooper!

My wife almost had a fit when she saw Speed Dating on the agenda, but by the time I'd spoken to forty people for two minutes at a time over an hour and a half, trust me I wasn't fit for anything.

I won't be one of the collaborators who get together next year, because I have other plans and Valerius is about to march into his most dangerous fight yet, with enemies on every side, but it opened my eyes to a whole new world, and showed that a writer with imagination, talent and commitment need never be idle.

Lest we forget

2011-11-13T07:33:00.000-08:00

Remembrance Day fell on Sunday the 13th this year, which, by coincidence, is also the anniversary of the Battle of Sheriffmuir, one of the pivotal battles of the 1715 Jacobite Rising. Every year on November 13, members of the Clan MacRae gather to commemorate the occasion and remember the fifty clansmen who fell, holding the Jacobite left wing and dying to the last man.

Jimi the Piper

Sheriffmuir is on the hill behind Bridge of Allan and Dunblane and it's become something of an annual event for me, a chance to catch up with my friend Jimi the Piper, a proud MacRae who provides the music at the event every year and former colleague from my weekly newspaper days.

Sheriffmuir can be a bleak, forbidding place, all heather and peat bog, and dark evergreens, but as a piece of land where men fought and died for their principles, a perfect spot to remember the dead of conflicts before and since. The MacRae historian gave an overview of the battle. How the Jacobites, led by the Earl of Mar, a man who would have been out of his depth commanding a Sunday school picnic, were on their way south to link up with a second Jacobite force, but had been met by Hanoverian troops commanded by the experienced and battle-hardened Duke of Argyle. The Hanoverians were outnumbered, but were a cohesive fighting force, those fighting for the Stuart cause were clansmen; warriors who knew how to fight, but next to nothing about the art of war. When they met, it was a tale of two flanks. The Hanoverian right overlapped the Jacobite left and the MacRaes died where they stood. On the Hanoverian left, the exact opposite happened and the Government troops were forced back towards Dunblane. The next day, Argyle, thinking he was beaten, but determined to fight again, took the field only to find that Mar, with victory his for the taking, had withdrawn back towards Perth.

Two hundred men, Hanoverians and Jacobites, still hold the ground at Sheriffmuir, beneath three great mounds of peat.

Pupils from St Ninian's Primary, Stirling, laid the wreath

During the two minutes silence, I thought about those men lying forever on this windswept hill, and my grandfather, Johnny Gordon, who left part of his nose and most of his friends on another bleak hillside, on 12 July 1915, when three hundred men of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers from Hawick, Jedburgh, Kelso, Galashiels, Selkirk and Melrose were killed on a single day at Achi Baba in Gallipoli. And I thought of the young men, courageous and professional, now fighting and dying among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, for, it seems to me, even less purpose.

A bird in the hand

2011-11-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Just a short post today with lots of pictures. My daughter Kara and I had a fantastic morning out at the Phoenix Falconry centre near Gleneagles, a birthday gift from my kids. Falconers Adrian and Steph gave us a wonderful insight into the world of raptors as we flew, among others an African Eagle Owl, a rare Caracara from the Falklands, a north American Buzzard that was actually an eagle, and an enormous Bald Eagle called Pilgrim. Passionate, professional and packed with interest, they ensured a memorable day in a wonderful location.

We were hugely impressed with the whole set up. I'd recommend it to anyone and definitely go back, maybe next time to go for the Walk on the Wild Side, when you fly the birds to catch their own dinner!

Kara with Measles the eagle owl

One man and his owl

Edith the Caracara (that's the one with wings) and Steph

She was noisy and fearsomely intelligent (the one with wings)

Kara and the gloriously marked buzzard

It was incredibly elegant in flight

They hit it off really well

The snake-eating eagle packed a punch

But the bald eagle was the pick of the bunch

Wow!

Happy landings

How could you not love it?

Adrian was a font of knowledge with a host of wonderful tales

Serves me right

2011-10-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

Update on previous post.

Call it hubris. Call it comeuppance. Call it the little man on the back of the Emperor's chariot saying 'You are only human'. Whatever you call it, it happened.

After crowing about last week's word output, I'd been working for about three hours today when my Mac ate my entire 51,000 word book. Hit save, it hangs up, then it crashes. Pages has had a failure and been forced to close. Mostly, you lose a couple of pars. This time Pfffft and the file disappears from the desktop. Search all you like, but it is no more. This is the second time, but I'd learned my lesson and I'd backed up my backups and most of my work was saved.

Suffice to say, I didn't do quite as much today as I expected.

We have a saying in the Borders: What's for ee, u'll no miss ee. Next time I'll keep quiet!

Climbing the mountain

2011-10-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

It can be a slog, but the view from the top makes it worthwhile

When Caligula was first published, I did an interview with David Robinson from The Scotsman and he teased a lot of very good information out of me, some of which didn't get into the newspaper. It came back to me this week when I noticed a phenomenon that's happened at some point in all my books. It's something that might be interesting to other writers, especially those on their first novel

I'm now on my ninth: five published, one on the way to production, one being written and two crime novels currently looking for a good home. The one I'm working on is The Isis Covenant, a follow up to The Doomsday Testament. A couple of weeks ago I was struggling with it, not certain whether I was in the right place or going in the right direction. The advice I always give other writers is that if you have a problem, just keep writing and you'll eventually write your way through it. So that's what I did, but I had a difficult couple of weeks.

The way I explained it to David was that writing a book is like going on one of those long distance walks in the hills where you plan to tackle two or three Munros. You make a start and you're full of beans, then you come to the long climb to the first summit and all you can see is what's directly in front of you. You're groping your way forward one step at at time and progress is slow. Eventually, though, you reach the top and the view ahead is clear, a glorious panorama that stretches for miles ahead. Suddenly everything is worthwhile and you're racing, you know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there.

I realise now that all I was doing two weeks ago was learning exactly what the book is about, working out the strengths and the weaknesses. Two weeks ago I was probably averaging two thousand words a day - way short of my usual daily target of three thousand - and struggling to do that. This week I wrote an entirely new opening chapter so the book now starts with a bang that increases the pace of the whole first quarter. In five days I wrote twenty thousand words, which is probably my best weekly output ever. No doubt there'll be another Munro to climb before I'm done, but the view from the top makes it all worthwhile.

*The paperback of Hero of Rome came out two weeks ago after quite a big gap, but it looks as if the wait was worthwhile. It sold 1300 copies in the first week in Asda alone and this week it popped up in the Top 10 historical novels at Waterstones. Transworld have ordered the first reprint. A great start and thanks to everyone who went out and bought it!

Dare to be different

2011-10-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

As writers we're always looking for the next big thing. The next Harry Potter. The next Da Vinci Code. The next Sharpe. That mega-bucks super-seller that will catapult its author to literary stardom and have Steven Spielberg knocking at the door waving his chequebook.

Of course, these things are entirely arbitrary. Even if you write a brilliant book or create a brilliant character, there's no guarantee that it'll be an instant success. There's also the undeniable fact that if you create something different, unique and innovative, you'll have a harder job selling it to a publisher than a more commercial, mainstream book with a guaranteed audience. Publishers are much more risk averse than in the past, and with good reason.

Cast your eye across genre fiction lists and you'll find that it's actually very difficult to come up with something that's unique. When I started writing Caligula sometime around 2004 (it was a project then, I didn't dare call it a book) I had no idea how crowded the historical fiction market was. Deep down I wanted to be the next Bernard Cornwell and I knew the name Conn Iggulden. I'd never heard of a guy called Simon Scarrow or read any CJ Sansom. I had no idea that at about the time I sat down and wrote the first sentence another half dozen excellent writers were doing the same with books that would become The Forgotten Legion, Warrior of Rome, Ship of Rome, Gladiatrix and the Empire series. Or that my old mate Bob Low, from Daily Record days, had already had his first Viking novels published and that Giles Kristian was about to follow in his wake. Caligula in its original form actually covers the same timescale as the early Macro and Cato books and Manda Scott's Boudicca series. If I'd known that at the time I probably wouldn't have dared write it.

At the beginning of 2010 I decided I could write two books a year and I put together some ideas for the next big historical thing. One of them was a five or six book series on the English Civil War with a character I thought could well be the new Sharpe and with each culminating in one of the major battles. It really was a great idea, and unique, or so I thought. My editor loved it, but about two weeks earlier the publishers had been presented with an idea for a civil war series with a character who could well be the new Sharpe, etc. etc. So in 2012, it'll be Giles Kristian who begins the journey to Marston Moor and Naseby, not me, and he'll make a brilliant job of it.

Anyway, I have strayed from the point, which was to celebrate a US publishing deal for a great writer who truly dared to be different. Guy Saville created an entire alternative Africa ruled by the victorious Nazis for his book The Afrika Reich, based on plans that were actually formulated under Hitler. It was an idea so innovative that at first he struggled to find a publisher, but once it was in print his perseverance paid off and it's been a huge success. Now major American publishers have thrown their considerable weight behind it, and that success is about to be deservedly replicated on the other side of the Atlantic.

That's what chums are for

2011-10-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

I tend to steer clear of politics in the blog, although I'm as exercised as anyone by the continuing idiocies of our political masters across the whole spectrum. My excuse is that this isn't about politics, it's about standards and even use of language.

And so to Liam Fox. The interesting thing for me in the last few days is the number of Tory backbench MPs - and there'll be those in the other parties - who appear to genuinely believe he's done nothing wrong. Yes, his chum who at one point lived rent free at the state's expense in the flat they shared, set up a health consultancy at the same time he was Health Secretary. Yes, the same chum miraculously changed his area of expertise to defence at the very moment that Dr Fox became Defence Secretary, but that's what chums do. Chums jet all over the world and sit in on sensitive business meetings with heads of state and high-ranking military officials (it's not yet clear who paid for the jets, but it'll all come out in the wash). Who hasn't got a chum who'd accompany him on 18 trips abroad, to Dubai, and Washington, and New Zealand and Sri Lanka? After all a chap needs someone interesting to talk to when he's stuck on a plane with all those boring civil servants and defence contractors.

Who cares that everyone outside the tranquil and economically independent village of Westminster thinks that, at best, Liam's chum Adam has been living off his back like an ever-expanding leech? And that Dr Fox has been a willing host to his blood-sucking best-man? All that matters is that Liam is one of us and has done a fine job making the armed forces more efficient, on the Greek model. Why, he even set up his own charity ( 'to establish, and develop ... a network of like-minded conservatives in politics, business, journalism and academe on both sides of the Atlantic' - Who knew the definition of charity was so broad?) with his chum, Adam in charge.

And of course, Adam didn't benefit directly from all this networking.

Liam: I am absolutely confident that he was not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income.

Interviewer: You what?

Liam: He's got his own money.

Interviewer: How do you know?

Liam: Because he told me.

Interviewer: That's all right then.

Who wouldn't be proud to have a chum like that?

History in the making

2011-09-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

Just getting organised for tomorrow night's History in the Court event in London. Down on the train from Stirling at 10 in the morning, then back the following day after a breakfast meeting - at Fortnum and Masons no less - with Simon, my editor. Tickets: check. Toothbrush: check. Change of wotsits. What more do you need?

I'll probably try to work on the way up and down: a nostalgic return to the days when I wrote The Emperor's Elephant on the train back and forward between Bridge of Allan and Edinburgh. I didn't find it quite so easy the last time I tried it, but six hours in front of the computer with no internet access is just what I need at the moment. If I get fed up, I'll read one of the dozens of books in my ever-growing TBR pile.

Truth be told, I've always found London a bit intimidating. Too big. Too impersonal. Too many people. Too many bricks and not enough grass and trees. As the song says: I'm just a small town boy ... I can't breathe properly unless I'm within walking distance of the countryside. Last time I was down, I got bit lost and had to ask directions. Three people ignored me, two just said 'Sorry mite' and walked past and the guy who eventually set me straight had a Scottish accent. What do you expect, I hear you ask? Well it wouldn't happen in Bridge of Allan or Jedburgh, or Edinburgh or Glasgow for that matter. It makes me uncomfortable to see so many people living their lives in self-imposed, self-satisfied blinkered isolation. Something quite 1984ish about it. If you dropped down with a heart attack would they help you, or just step over you?

Anyway I'll let you know how I get on in the next blog. With fifty-odd of Britain's best historical writers in one place at the same time there has to be something worth talking about.

The Godfather of Historical Fiction

2011-09-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago I picked up a book in the local library that opened the door to decades of reading pleasure and a contract with excellence that has more or less been annually renewed ever since. That book was Sharpe's Eagle.

Sharpe opened my eyes to Wellington's Peninsular campaign in a way no teacher ever could. Here was the blood and guts of Talavera laid out before me through the eyes of a man destined to become an epic hero of literature. I loved, and still do, the meticulously researched history of the Sharpe books, but it is so much more than that. There are the wonderful, carefully woven fictional stories of love and death and betrayal, the heroines, heroes and especially the villains; who will ever forget the despicable Sergeant Hakeswill, the duplicitous Ducos or the odious Simmerson?

Yet Bernard Cornwell, surely the Godfather of historical fiction, is more than Sharpe. Take your pick from the Grail Quest, Redcoat, Starbuck or Uhtred, but for me the best of them all is the Arthur trilogy, an epic achievement by a remarkable writer.

And he's still going strong! On Monday Mr Cornwell begins a book tour to celebrate the publication of what is, by my count, his 49th solo novel, The Death of Kings. If you get the chance go along and say hello to a true legend.

Onwards and upwards

2011-09-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

Had a chat with Stan, the agent, about future projects yesterday and came up with a lot of interesting possibilities. In true morale boosting fashion, he brought along a copy of last week's Bookseller which has The Doomsday Testament featuring at No. 5 in the Movers and Shakers chart, and, would you believe, down from No.1 the previous week.

It can't be bad when you're rubbing
shoulders with Le Carré

Great to see James Douglas up there with some of the biggest names in fiction. I knew it had been doing well because it was pretty high up in the Waterstone's thriller chart, rubbing shoulders with Lee Child, James Patterson and John Le Carre, which is fantastic. It gave me a real thrill to be in the same league as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, because Mr Le Carre (aka David Cornwell and dad of my friend Tim) wrote me a letter full of encouragement when I sent him a proof copy of Caligula.

Stan loved my idea for a third Jamie Saintclair book, and I'm now putting together some thoughts for a fourth.

I've already put together a detailed plan for a further three Valerius novels. Avenger of Rome leaves him perfectly placed for The Year of the Four Emperors, in AD 69, when the Empire was torn apart by civil war and which provides the plots for two of the books. There are three possibilities for the third of the trilogy, but I especially like the one that allows me to finally reveal what happened to Rufus and Bersheba at the end of The Emperor's Elephant. Of course, it all depends on my publishers and how well they think Hero of Rome and Defender of Rome have done, but Valerius is growing in character with every book and I'd like to take him as far as I can.

We also talked about how e-books will develop and Stan has some great ideas in that line, and we mulled over the possibility of branching out into non-fiction at some point, although finding the time would obviously be the biggest problem.

AND finally, I took part in a wonderful Write to be Published event at Stirling's Tollbooth on Sunday, when Bob McDevitt of Hachette and I talked about our experiences to an audience of writers, before Nicola Morgan gave a workshop. Nicola very kindly said I was a great example for any writer. I must bear that in mind when I get stuck into The Isis Covenant next week!

The Invisible Man

2011-08-28T03:44:00.000-07:00

Something occurred to me about The Doomsday Testament recently that gives me a lot of satisfaction as a writer, but that I hadn't realised when I was writing it. There's not a single line of physical description for one of the main characters.

He's not tall or short, fat or thin. His nose isn't blunt or long or sharp. His eyes never twinkle and they have no colour. He exists, but only in the reader's imagination.

It wasn't a conscious decision on my part, but it wasn't a mistake either. It's just that I was so comfortable in the character himself that I never needed to flesh him out. What he is, he is through his thoughts and his feelings, and what other people think, say about or see in him. We believe we know him, because when we first meet him he's part of a certain type of group, but singled out from it because he doesn't quite belong. I'd always wanted him to be an enigma, but I didn't realise just how successful I'd been.

Doomsday and Defender of Rome are off to a great start. They've both had very good early reviews. The hardback of Defender is doing well on Amazon and Doomsday sold around 2,700 copies in the first week, which is impressive for a debut novel by an unknown writer, as James Douglas is. To give it some perspective, if they'd been hardback sales the novel would be sitting at about No. 5 in the UK sales charts. How much of that is down to the tremendous marketing effort by Transworld and how much to my Heath Robinson campaign on Facebook and Twitter, I don't know, but a huge thanks to everyone for their support.

This week I'll be giving the first draft of Avenger of Rome a polish before it goes off to my publisher, then it's on to The Isis Covenant and another hair-raising adventure for Jamie Saintclair.

Urgent

2011-08-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

URGENT: This is for anyone who received the hacker begging e-mail saying that I was in Madrid and needed money. I scanned my Mac using security software today and it found two Zbots which are a very nasty kind of spyware aimed at getting your bank details. If you received the message and opened it, please do a security scan

Hacked off

2011-08-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

It feels like being burgled. Some time on Thursday night someone hacked into my internet account and sent a message to all of my contacts, saying that I was stranded in Madrid and that I need 1500 euros to get home. Although it wasn’t well written, it sounded plausible because I’ve been in Madrid twice recently, visiting my daughter, and it was signed Doug, rather than Douglas.

The first I knew of it was on Friday morning when I looked on Facebook and one of my contacts had sent me a message warning I’d been hacked. I didn’t think it was a big problem until I checked my e-mails. I had about four hundred saved for various reasons and they were all gone. The hackers had also stolen my entire contacts list.

My daughter Nikki showed me the e-mail she’d got and I felt sick to think that everyone I’d ever had contact with on the internet had been sent something like that. The frightening thing was that they seemed to know that I’d spent time in Spain recently because Nikki had been working there. God only knows what they’ll do with all the information from the e-mails I’ve sent and received.

If I’d had my contacts list I could have sent out a warning, but I wasn’t able to even do that. I immediately went on Facebook where I have about six hundred friends on my personal and author pages and warned everybody, then did the same on Twitter.

It was only this morning (Saturday) that I discovered that a friend of my mum’s had been taken in by the e-mail. Worse, the hackers had come back to her and asked for more money to help pay a hotel bill. It just makes you incredibly sick to think that these cyber vultures are able to prey on someone’s basic instinct to help a friend in need. I only hope that she’s the only one.

My account is with BT, but to be honest they didn’t seem interested in the fact that I’d been hacked, which is pretty outrageous. I spent about three hours on the phone to a young Indian guy trying to get the account working again and he was very good. But you’d think that if phone hacking is so prolific they’d have some sort of provision made to protect their customers. Surely they should have some kind of emergency hotline where you can report it and get an instant response.

But who was the bloke in the beard?

2011-08-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

Brilliant! That's all that needs to be said about Wednesday night's launch of Defender of Rome and The Doomsday Testament.

They were sent out into the world on a tidal wave of good will thanks to the seventy plus friends and family who turned out at Blackwell's bookshop in Edinburgh. They came from a' the airts, as we say in Scotland: Jedburgh, Edinburgh, Glasgow and my neighbours from Bridge of Allan. But the prize for furthest flung has to go to my friend Derek who flew in from Delhi.

My speech was a mix of triumph and disaster. My jokes were actually quite funny, but I somehow managed to mislay page five and after a stuttering halt had to wing the rest. Funnily enough that got the second biggest laugh of the night. The biggest was for the mysterious bloke with a beard you could hide a badger in who appeared halfway through. Maybe it was Bob Low's younger, much more handsome brother.

I signed so many books that my wrist ached and I was still doing it when they started putting the lights out.

Bevvy of beauties: My mum, daughter Kara, Siobhan, Lorraine, Sandra and my sister Carol

Our friends Pete and Maureen

And Allison and Alan

Lorna and Ross, my earthquake advisers

Mum and my lovely wife Alison

Siobhan and Carol, from Canada

Standing room only

In retrospect, the tie was probably a mistake

James Douglas makes a late appearance

I don't know about you, but he scares me

The Gees and the Rintouls

Lynne Hawley, Christine and Billy Piper and David Caperauld

So thanks to everyone who came along and to those who couldn't make it, you missed a great night. Roll on next year!

Prepare for launch

2011-08-15T01:46:00.000-07:00

I can still remember the heady mixture of exhilaration, excitement, anticipation and, let's face it, pure terror, in the days leading up to my book launch for Caligula in 2008. It was a venture into the complete unknown, like walking blindfold down a busy street filled with pitfalls and possibilities. On the one hand, there were no worries about success or failure, because having a book published was success enough. On the other, it's the nearest thing to putting your newborn up in a fairground coconut shy.

Imagine what it's like doing it with twins.

Defender of Rome, the second in my Valerius Verrens series, and The Doomsday Testament, my first venture into thriller writing as James Douglas, will be launched on Wednesday at a party in Edinburgh (6.30pm at Blackwell's, 53 South Bridge if you can make it). To be honest, I've been so busy finishing the first draught of my next book and shamelessly plugging these ones that I haven't had time to think about it. But with three days to go the adrenalin is kicking in. The terror has been replaced by a mild case of nerves. Apart from that it's much the same.

Experience has taught me to keep my expectations low and my hopes high. With Caligula anything seemed possible. I know now that being an author is about patience: about building an audience and always striving to make the next book better than the ones that went before. And yet ...

For a debut book Doomsday has created quite a stir. It's already into its third printing and it'll be on sale in all the big supermarkets - a first for me and one which opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. Ask me what I'd hope for Defender and I'd say enough advance sales (it takes about two thousand) to get into the hardback Top Ten for the first time.

It doesn't matter how much you try to keep your feet on the ground, a writer always has his head in the clouds.

What is The Doomsday Testament?

2011-08-08T02:00:00.000-07:00

What is The Doomsday Testament?
A SECRET that could save the world or destroy it.
A SECRET that governments and corporations are prepared to kill for.
A SECRET that hundreds of men and women have already paid for with their lives.
And the only clues lie in the diary of Captain Matthew Sinclair's final reluctant mission of World War Two.

'I should tell him I am the wrong man for this operation. That I am burned out and numb, and that I welcome the numbness because it protects me from the man I have become. The war has drained me of all humanity. I feel like a boxer at the end of a fifteen round contest. I have nothing more to give.'

Retweet on Twitter or share on Facebook for a chance to win one of five copies of The Doomsday Testament.

Thanks to everyone who already has. All the names will go into a hat and I'll announce the winners at the end of the week.

What is the Doomsday Testament?

2011-08-02T01:36:00.000-07:00

In 1937, Heinrich Himmler sent a team of SS explorers into Tibet on the pretext of carrying out a scientific study into the flora and fauna of the Himalayan mountains. The true purpose of the expedition had a much more sinister purpose: to discover the entrance to the secret underground city of the Vril, the forerunners of the Aryan race, and unlock the powers that would allow the Nazis to dominate the world.

In 2008, art recovery expert Jamie Saintclair is clearing out his late grandfather's house when he finds a scarred box of military mementoes which paint the old man's life in a whole new light. Even more astonishing is the journal Matthew kept detailing his experiences during the war and maintained right up until his last mysterious mission.

Three thousand miles away terrorists launch a daring raid on the Menshikov Palace in St Petersburg and are only thwarted from blowing up the entire collection by the bravery of a Russian security guard. But why would they only remove a single exhibit which is almost worthless in comparison to the Old Masters and priceless statues they could have stolen? What makes an ancient Tibetan casket looted from a Berlin museum in the dying days of World War Two so important?

The Doomsday Testament hold the key.

Retweet or share on Facebook for a chance to win one of five copies of

Make it happen - and win The Doomsday Testament

2011-07-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

How would you like to win a free copy of The Doomsday Testament? My publishers are giving away five copies to celebrate the publication of the debut thriller by James Douglas. All you need to do to be in with a chance of winning is use Facebook and Twitter to tell your friends and encourage them to tell their friends. If you haven't signed up already you can follow me on Twitter @Dougwriter and on Facebook at Doug Jackson, author.

Over the next three weeks I'll be putting out enigmatic, intriguing hints about the book and in the week before The Doomsday Testament is published I'll distribute links which will allow you to read the first two chapters for free. I need everybody who follows me or is my friend on the internet to share or retweet the posts and ask their friends to do the same. Before publication day on 18 August we'll randomly select five names from the people who've reposted the links and the winners will receive advance copies of the book.

So what is The Doomsday Testament?

The Doomsday Testament is a desperate race against time to find the deadliest lost secret of the Second World War. Art recovery expert Jamie Saintclair didn't know his grandfather was a war hero until he discovered his medals after he died. Alongside the decorations is a journal detailing the old man's war years - and his last, most dangerous mission. The problem is that the final twenty pages are missing and the only way Jamie will find out how Operation Doomsday ended is by unravelling the clues in the journal and the significance of the strange symbol his grandfather has kept hidden for sixty years. The hunt takes him to Germany where memories of the war won't go away and where he must stay one step ahead of the men who would kill to discover the journal's contents.

I think it's a great book, full of drama, conspiracy and cliffhanger action, but I need your help to make it the success it deserves to be. So get the ball rolling by sharing and retweeting this blog to your friends and your friends friends and help make The Doomsday Testament the next big thing.

The Doomsday Testament 'Imagine The Odessa File meets The Da Vinci Code and you won't be far away' Douglas Jackson, author of Caligula, Claudius, Hero of Rome and Defender of Rome (well he would say that wouldn't he)

A little piece of history

2011-07-19T13:25:00.000-07:00

Think of yourself on the film set of an updated version of Time Bandits. Roman legionaries march by led by a centurion and eagle bearer; knights in full armour launch their horses at each other in the lists; the English Civil war rages on one side, while in a nearby field a group of riflemen gets ready to take on Napoleon. Desert Rats, the Forgotten Army, the Red Berets, Nazi Stormtroopers, Yank GIs with jeeps and half tracks and the Red Army, all living cheek by jowl. Throw in twenty thousand spectators and mix for a kind of T in the Park for people who like armour, guns and swords and you have the Festival of History at Kelmarsh.

Re-enactors of every kind were living the dream

Oh, and then there was the Historical Writers' Association. Thirty two of Britain's best writers of historical fiction and non-fiction holding forth in twelve events over two days, magnificently organised by chair Manda Scott and her merry band of helpers, and every event attended by two hundred people or more. It was fantastic to be there and even better to be part of it. It also proved once again that, as a breed, writers are nice people who'll generally do anything for anybody. I hope it's the start of something big that will get even bigger.

A Spitfire and Messerschmitt duel

Apart from being on stage with my brilliant panel of Harry Sidebottom (Warrior of Rome), Ruth Downie (the Ruso series) and John Stack (Masters of the Seas), my favourite memory is of smooth Simon Scarrow and the rather more rustic approach of Robert Low as they battled it out verbally to decide who would have won between the Romans and the Vikings. While they debated what an annoying bed-farting, bottom-scratching partner would have been called before the Vikings came up with the word husband it sounded as if World War Three had broken out a hundred yards away and they didn't turn a hair.

Bob Low signs one of many books

I met dozens of people who are fascinated by historical fiction, including two (Jim and Kate) who've become friends through the internet. It was wonderful to see you all. By some miracle Bantam Press had managed to get copies of Defender of Rome to Kelmarsh, even though the ink was barely dry. And I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when out of the blue a Spitfire and Messerschmitt staged a mock dogfight overhead.

The Red Army

Defender of Rome makes it to the shelves

Everybody joined in

Yanks with their tanks

It was a fantastic event for any history lover and if you ever get the chance to go, you really should!

Doomsday is coming

2011-07-06T03:34:00.000-07:00

It's just over a month until the launch of The Doomsday Testament, the debut thriller by my alter ego and international man of mystery James Douglas. I’m really proud of it and I hope you’ll love it too, but now I'm stuck with the debut novelist's Catch-22: How do I get people to read my brilliant new book if nobody knows about it?

My publisher will be pushing it, trying to get it into the supermarkets and WH Smith (which is more difficult than you might think) and it's 50 per cent off at Amazon, but people can only buy The Doomsday Testament if they have heard about it. And it is here that I’d like to ask for your help.

Can we use the exponential power of the internet to make sure that even if they don't read The Doomsday Testament, at least they'll have heard about it?

Over the next month I'll be putting out intriguing teasers about The Doomsday Testament and all I ask is that wherever possible you retweet or share them, and ask all your friends to do the same. I have about 500 friends on my Facebook pages and 300 on Twitter, so even if half of them retweet and half of their friends retweet, etc. etc. You do the maths, but by my calculation everybody on the planet who owns a computer will know about The Doomsday Testament by a week on Wednesday.

So there you are, not only do you get the chance to help a struggling debut author become the next big thing, but you'll have the privilege of taking part in a unique social experiment (well it's unique to me).

Thanks to everyone who's already into the spirit of things by sharing my blatant plugs, and thanks in advance to everyone who takes part.

Your first job is to share this or retweet it to as many people as you can bully, bribe, cajole and anything else of a non-violent nature.

To infinity and beyond ...

The Doomsday Testament: 'Imagine The Odessa File meets the Da Vinci Code and you won't be far away' - Douglas Jackson (OK, he has a certain investment in the project, but he's one of only three people who’ve read it, if you count my editor and agent,and anyway it's true)

When the price is too high

2011-07-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

Just heard the depressing news of another British soldier killed in Afghanistan. I watched a programme on BBC i-player a couple of nights ago about the Battle for Helmand, and it was a fascinating portrait of men at war. The professionalism, courage and dedication of the young British men fighting and dying there is astonishing and their devotion to their comrades profoundly moving.

I only have one question. Why do we keep sending our young men to be killed in an essentially pointless war they cannot possibly win?

History tells us that Afghanistan is one of the most intractable places on the planet. Alexander the Great struggled to subdue it. A highly organised, but poorly led British army underestimated the tribesfolk in 1842 and paid a terrible price. It was the Soviet equivalent of Vietnam.

So what has changed? The programme painted a picture of soldiers sent out to man remote outposts in the middle of enemy territory as part of what amounted to little more than a political PR campaign. The reasons for their deployment were hazy. Nobody talks about defeating the Taleban any more. Every day they patrolled streets and roads laced with mines by resourceful, ruthless opponents who knew exactly where they must pass. They endured and suffered in awful conditions and the nearest they came to fun was in an occasional liberating firefight with men who were farmers by day and warriors by night. Their skills counted for nothing; no amount of training can save you if a roadside bomb explodes next to you. Their fortresses were islands in a hostile sea. They depended on the charity of the Americans to evacuate their casualties and that charity was sometimes not available, with fatal consequences.

Even heavily armed and with air cover, they couldn't venture much more than half a mile beyond their own perimeters and, when they withdrew, the ground that they had held reverted to the Taleban within minutes. Their officers despaired of the lack of equipment and support. The cooperation they received from the poorly trained and badly led Afghan army was negligible. Yet the morale of the men who spoke to the cameras remained high, their pride was clear and their resolve self-evident

The men of the British Army are prepared to stay in Afghanistan and pay the price as long as their government asks them too. Yet I have never heard a coherent argument from a general or a politician which justifies or even properly explains what our final objective in Afghanistan is. The latest pronouncement from the government is that the last soldier will leave in 2015 when responsibility for security has been handed over to the Afghans. Four more years, for what? An article a few days ago by a former British ambassador revealed how he had asked an Afghan minister how long his army would hold Kabul when the Allies left. The answer was 24 hours.

The message that came across in the programme was that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility and not worth the life of another British soldier. Unfortunately, that British soldier died today. Isn't it time to stand up and say bring them home now?

A birdie in the hand ...

2011-06-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

So how did the golf go, I hear you ask?

Actually, it went entirely to plan. I only embarrassed myself moderately. Had one air shot, several scuffs and when I got the ball in the air it often went in the wrong direction. On the plus side, I hit two what I would class as good drives (in the air AND towards the hole), two chips that ended up a foot from the cup and earned the applause of my team mates, and I sank an eighteen foot birdie putt.

Jedburgh Golf Club, on the lower slopes of the Dunion Hill overlooking the town, is a wonderful setting. My fellow team members were three of the best amateur golfers I've ever witnessed in action; Harry Hogg, who used to stay three doors away from me in Allerley Crescent, his wife Pauline, the ladies club champion, and their son Connor, the youth champ. Team Hogg were unlucky enough to get me in the ballot when they could have had any of several members of the 1984 Scottish Grand Slam side, two former pro footballers or the local MSP. Young Connor hit the ball so far on the long par five that Gavin Hastings, who has a handicap so low that it's almost below freezing, called it obscene.

Thanks entirely to my playing partners we ended up just outside the prizes in fourth place. But it wasn't the winning that mattered, it was the taking part and raising money for the club, which is a wonderful asset to the town. It was a real pleasure to be asked and a bigger one to take part.

If you play golf and ever get the opportunity, do give the Jedburgh course a try. It's a glorious place, a real test and you're guaranteed a warm welcome from the very best of Border folk.

A very special agent

2011-06-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting afternoon with Stan, my agent, yesterday at the Cafe Royal in Edinburgh. Your agent's job isn't just about selling your book ideas for vast amounts of money (in your dreams), but also to encourage, boost your confidence and inspire you to greater efforts.

Stan does all these things really well.

Last time it was about the US and film deals that were just around the corner. They're still around the corner, but the anticipation has kept me going for months.

Yesterday, they were filming some TV drama outside the pub. which seemed like a good omen. We talked about where I should be going next with my historical novels and he liked all the ideas I've come up with. I should have completed the first draughts of my next two books by the turn of the year and I need to have something new to begin by around then. A lot depends on where the current trilogy is, which makes the paperback of Hero of Rome and the Defender of Rome hardback pretty crucial to my future.

He was also very complimentary about The Doomsday Testament (he's the only person outside the publisher who's read it). He thinks it's a great package that could really take off, which is what any writer likes to hear (see encouragement above). By coincidence, I'm reading the book proof of Doomsday at the moment and I think it feels like a cross between The Odessa File and The Da Vinci Code, which is a happy thought and one I'll nourish until it comes out on August 18!

Time for tee

2011-06-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about writing for a living is that you get to meet so many great people, at signings, book festivals, workshops and the like.

This month I've been invited to take part in a pro-celebrity golf tournament in my home town of Jedburgh, at the fantastic 18-hole course on the Dunion hill. The fact that I haven't picked up a golf club for about three years hopefully won't spoil my enjoyment of the day.

Gavin Hastings at the Dunhill Cup. Do I want him on my side laughing at my
swing or on the other side shooting eagles? Photo: The Scotsman

Judging by the competition, I suspect I'll be out of the prizes, unless it's the booby prize. The rest of the invited guests are just about all proper celebrities, with half a dozen former Scotland rugby players and footballers among them. And you just know that they'll be low handicap golfers, as opposed to hackers like me.

So on the 24th June, I'll be teeing off beside Messrs Gavin Hastings, John Rutherford, Keith Robertson, Finlay Calder, Peter Dods, Jim Leishman, Pat Nevin and Andy Lawrie. Radio presenter and rugby coach Gary Parker, who I know from my days in Melrose will be there, along with local politicians and musicians.

Should be a great day.

One more step

2011-06-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

A little treat for fans who enjoyed Hero of Rome. This is the first page of the sequel, Defender of Rome, and anyone who read the first book will realise that all is not as it seems.

The proof read copy of the MS appeared in the post today. I now have a fortnight to make any last minute changes and give it a couple more reads while two professional proof readers do the same thing for the publisher.

Wish me luck!

The lost manuscript

2011-06-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

The other day I came across an e-mail I'd written a year and a half ago about a pitch I was making for a crime book I'd just completed. It was part of my master plan for making a living as a writer and I was looking for a quick answer. The book wasn't quite right, my agent came back to me and I made the alterations he suggested ... and forgot all about it.

The reason I know this is because I've just finished a long-intended rewrite of the first novel in that series, which I started in about 2006, and I was searching for the original synopsis. I think they're both great books, with fantastic main characters, fast paced and a real story to tell, but because of everything that's happened in between they've ended up on the back burner.

In a recent interview, I was asked what advice I would give to a writer looking to be published. I thought about it for a long time, but there really was only one answer: persevere. I should probably have added: always check your e-mails and never throw away an idea.

Since I made that pitch I've written Defender of Rome, The Doomsday Testament and I'm half way through Avenger of Rome, with an epic battle still to fight. That means Brothers in Arms and War Games will stay on the back burner for a while, but I intend to persevere until they're in print too.

One of the great things about interviews is that you find yourself listening to your own advice: for once!

The memories that never leave you

2011-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Somebody was asking me the other day how I came up with the idea for my thriller The Doomsday Testament. I said that I just sat down one weekend, thought of a long forgotten artefact with world-changing potential, created a suitable myth around it set in a time I was interested in, then gave my character, Jamie Saintclair, the job of solving the mystery of where it had vanished to.

I now realise that isn't true.

The Doomsday Testament is actually about the secrets that men keep, even from their families. For years, ever since I was little, I'd asked my father that age old question 'What did you do in the war, daddy?' and he'd just smiled. Only gradually did he reveal that he'd been in Malaya during the Emergency (they were too coy to call it a war), but not as one of the famous Virgin Soldier conscripts, he'd had a great time and the only injury he'd suffered was on the football field.

My dad, centre, with two soldiers from an Irish regiment

It wasn't until he was in his seventies that I learned what really happened. At that point, he seemed to need to recall what had been the most traumatic and vivid time of his life and pass it on to me, his eldest son. In the late 1940s and early 50s he'd served one tour of duty with the Seaforth Highlanders, mainly in the uniquely dangerous position as platoon scout, patrolling the Malayan jungle looking for the enemy, CTs or communist terrorists. He'd killed and seen men, including his friends, die, some of them in terrible ways. But when he returned to Britain he immediately asked for a transfer so he could go back to Malaya on a second tour. This time he had to watch as his comrades in the Gordons went through the same deadly learning curve he'd already experienced, officers shunning the advice of a mere private. It culminated in one of the deadliest ambushes of the war, with a British major, a captain and a lieutenant killed along with many others.

He kept all this bottled up for more than fifty years, but I doubt that never a day passed without him remembering one or other aspect of that time in the jungle. When he did eventually speak, it was obvious those events had changed him and that the mental scars they'd caused still remained. A few months before he died last year he left me a history of his life in about 30-odd tight written pages.

I didn't see that 'journal' until many months after I'd come up with the idea for The Doomsday Testament, but the central theme of my book is a young man's journey of discovery through his grandfather's diary of the last days of World War Two.

And my point is? I don't really know. I just thought it was worth mentioning.

No news is good news

2011-05-08T04:43:00.000-07:00

As I looked out the window today at the rain bouncing six inches off the pavement I was reminded of Juliette Mills in Avanti, telling Jack Lemmon how pleased she was to be in Italy because the British summer was two weeks in May and a week in June.

Simon, my editor, liked what I'd done with The Doomsday Testament, which was a relief, and I took a couple of days off during our few days of summer last week and drove up to Dunkeld, the little Perthshire town on the River Tay. It's a beautiful place, packed full of history and with gardens and walks along the river where I watched a fisherman catch a salmon (a rare event in my experience) and then lose it (which isn't). Earlier, we'd driven a couple of miles out of town to the Loch of the Lowes nature reserve where you can get incredible views of ospreys at the nest there. Once rare, you can now see these beautiful birds from the Highlands to the Borders. I once watched one swoop to take a trout from the Forth while I was fishing a couple of miles from my house and it completely took my breath away.

The bridge over the River Tay at Dunkeld

One of the most pleasant aspects of the past couple of weeks has been to sit back and watch all those big news events from a distance, instead of being in the middle of a freaked out newsroom and about two steps from a nervous breakdown.

The Royal Wedding? Managed to avoid it entirely, there's only so much oily sycophancy a man can take. Osama Bin Laden? How could the White House make such a hash of the aftermath? If you're going to commit state-sponsored murder what's the point of making feeble excuses about it? The Scottish elections? Utterly compelling. I've met Alex Salmond a couple of times and he's a charming man with an ego the size of Edinburgh Castle. Giving him an electoral majority is like putting a chocaholic in charge of a sweet shop. Mark my words, it's going to be messy.

So now it's back to Avenger of Rome and head down for a couple of months. Valerius ships out for Antioch and a date with destiny in the Armenian mountains. Can't wait to get there.

The write stuff

2011-04-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

I've just pressed the button on the latest rewrite of The Doomsday Testament and I have to admit to a sigh of relief and reaching for the nearest wine bottle. It was the toughest writing assignment and the tightest deadline I've had since I started writing full time.

A few weeks ago I did a blog on the impact a copy editor has on your books and I had quite a few comments either through the blog or on Facebook. A few of them were a little mixed up about the various stages a novel goes through, so I thought this week I'd try to explain the difference because I think it's important for anyone being taken on by a publisher, or who's considering self-publishing their book, to know.

Once you've completed the first draught of your novel and struggled through all the emotions and doubts that go hand in hand with the process you'll want someone to read it. Maybe it's a friend, maybe it's your agent, but if you have a publisher it will be your editor. You may think you've written a masterpiece (though I haven't met a writer yet who ever does), you might think it's got more holes than a Swiss cheese; whatever your opinion, your editor's job is to make it a better book.

For The Doomsday Testament my editor suggested improvements in three major strands of the novel: the bad guys, the love interest and the fact that I'd given my characters a rest in the middle section. It meant taking an overview of the whole book, removing entire sections and writing in others, all of which changed the dynamics, introduced new personnel and affected the way the characters thought and felt. It turned out to be a major, mentally challenging job that affected about seventy-five per cent of the novel and I still don't know if I got it right. Would I have put that amount of effort in without the encouragement of an editor whose judgement I've learned to trust? I doubt it. I knew the book wasn't quite right, but I would have tinkered with a passage here and a character there and felt I'd done a great job.

I think that's the fundamental difference between an author who self-publishes and one who has a publishing deal and one that every writer should consider if they're faced with the luxury of choosing between an established publisher and going it alone. There are a lot of great self-published books out there by committed, talented authors, but how many of them would have been even better with the support of an editor? Unless you're very fortunate you won't have someone with that sort of experience, professional detachment and stake in the end result willing to encourage you to push it on to the next stage, and the one after that. It's like a trainer working with a sprint athlete to knock another tenth of a second from their time.

The next stage in the process is the copy editor, whose input I covered in Mistakes, I made a few a month ago. The copy editor looks at the minutiae and the actual writing, saves you from your mistakes and tightens things up. After that it's down to the wire and the proof-reading stage, which a few people have confused with editing. A proof-reader's job (two work on my books) is to spot mistakes and typos. While all this is going on I'll be working on the manuscript in tandem with them, making my own cuts, changes and improvements. The end result, hopefully, is a book that's as good as we can make it.

Like watching crocodiles dismember a baby zebra

2011-03-30T01:42:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of days I've been keeping an eye on a literary soap opera that perfectly illustrates the power of the internet to make or break a budding author.

On March 16, a blog called BigAl's books and pals, which specialises in critiques of independently published e-books, reviewed The Greek Seaman by a British-born author called Jacqueline Howett. I haven't read the book, but the review seemed fair enough. Al's conclusion was that it was a good story marred by spelling and grammar errors and he awarded it two stars.

One of the first things I learned as a writer, largely thanks to putting my early stuff up on the Youwriteon.com website, was that you have to roll with the punches. There's always the temptation when you get a review that is painful or just plain wrong to hit the keyboard and tell the reviewer why he's so mistaken. You don't. You take a deep breath and start the next paragraph.

Unfortunately, Jacqueline didn't.

Two days later she posted three five-star reviews from Amazon that said just how good her book really is. Perhaps it's a measure of her innocence that one of them came from someone with the same surname.

Her counter-attack got up the noses of some of Big Al's 606 followers, who pointed out that he was only giving an honest opinion. But Jacqueline still didn't let up. Fast forward a week and we're into a debate about which version had been reviewed and the author is upbeat that all the attention has increased her sales. If she'd just walked away then, maybe it might have worked out, but she always had to have the last word, which even more unfortunately turned out to be F*** Off!

By now Al's pals had alerted their friends and the debate had gone viral. Everyone knew about Jacqueline and wanted their say. The blog had 300 comments before Al, who comes out of all this pretty well, closed the gates.

But you can't shut out the internet and the pack had scented blood.

The battle moved to The Greek Seaman's Amazon page and a feeding frenzy in which the book was dismembered, her reputation as a writer destroyed and ultimately buried under an avalanche of ill-informed, sometimes vicious 1-star reviews (50-odd at the last count) from people who had evidently never read the book, and who I doubt have ever put in the hours of effort required to write one themselves, It was horrific to witness, but fascinating in the way of one of those wildlife documentaries where you watch the baby zebra come down to the waterhole where the crocodile lies in wait.

What do I think?

Jacqueline shouldn't have risen to the bait, but there's something sickening about this pack mentality and the way the internet allows faceless, nameless individuals to tear apart someone who has at least had the guts to create something and put it out there. Get back to the keyboard, write another book under a different name and think Amanda Hocking, but, please, this time get a professional editor to take a look at it before you publish it.

A face that launched a thousand quips

2011-03-21T12:31:00.000-07:00

Some people collect stamps or old vinyl records, I collect faces. Not, I hasten to add, in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way, but so that I have a bank of characters for future books.

On the trip to London the other day, I picked up half a dozen, male and female, and all shapes and sizes. So if you were on the 10.30 Edinburgh to King's Cross and saw a furtive looking bloke intermittently staring at other passengers and writing in a black notebook, don't worry, that would be me.

It's not just about physically describing the features. Eyes are OK, because there are any number of colour permutations, and, to a certain extent, your eyes are the treasure chest of your secrets, but noses, though (see above) they come in all shapes and sizes, aren't all that interesting to record, and ears are large, small, possibly delicate, and occasionally cauliflower, but that's about it. Chins? Don't get me started about chins. No, the secret, and the greatest test for a writer, is to use the face as a window into the soul of its owner.

I've had a couple of so-so reviews of Hero of Rome lately, the kind of thing that you're always going to get if a book's selling well, because you know you're never going to please everybody. But the odd thing about these reviews is that they both took me to task about the same thing. I'd made the lead characters too handsome, intelligent or beautiful. In an odd way its something of a compliment, because I always intended Valerius to be strong and likeable. Maeve had to be striking enough to immediately grab his attention and draw him across the cultural divide. One of the fun things for me is creating characters who are my exact opposite, which is why Valerius is tall and clever, with sculpted features and hair he can run his fingers through, not short, bald with a head shaped like a baked potato. So I make no apologies for taking the decisions I did. My question is: when did it become a crime to put good looking people in a book?

The face I liked best on Thursday and Friday wasn't on any of the pretty girls or handsome blokes. She had a heavy forehead, a strong jaw and a nose that took no prisoners, in fact features that were quite mannish. Yet the moment she opened her mouth to speak she turned into a different person: it was like witnessing base metal turn into gold. She seemed to caress every syllable and turn it into a musical note, and it was only when you heard her speak that you noticed that the beauty of her voice was matched by her eyes. I don't know her name, but I suspect she'll be appearing in a novel near you quite soon.

Mistakes, I've made a few ...

2011-03-11T05:23:00.000-08:00

I've spent the past week going through the copy-edited manuscript of Defender of Rome. The MS is about three and a half inches thick and made up of 338 pages of A4 that contains, at the last count, around 110,000 lovingly crafted words chronicling the continuing life of Gaius Valerius Verrens, hero of Colonia, after his return to a Rome ruled by an ever-more erratic Emperor Nero.

There are a lot of vital stages in the production of a book, but the copy-edit is right at the top. It's a process that every writer has to go through, and for some it's a chore, but I thought it was worth giving you an idea how it works.

For me it's always a time of part-pleasure, part-frustration. The pleasure comes in knowing the book is another step closer to becoming a reality, and the fact that your character has developed in ways you would never have imagined when you wrote the first novel. The frustration is that I've had to drop my next book, Avenger of Rome, half way through, and that I'm having to face up to the numerous mistakes I made writing Defender.

My copy-editor, Nancy, has a wonderful eye and the Classical education I wish I'd had. She came up with twenty major queries or suggestions, which isn't bad in a complex story of over 100,000 words, and an average of about three minor tweaks (cuts, improvements or corrections) a page, every one of which improves the book in some way. While I checked what she's done (was I tired when I wrote that the world 'spun on its access' or just stupid?) I made my own corrections etc, which amount to a 3,000 word document affecting around 250 of those 338 pages. I'm never sure whether to be pleased I'm able to make such a difference even at this late stage, or embarrassed at the amount of work I've had to do on something I once thought was the finished article. Again, every change should be a further improvement in quality, whether its historical accuracy or the standard of the writing. Bear in mind that this is after my editor, Simon, has taken the novel through a similar process, focussing on the storyline and the writing rather than the facts, and I've probably checked it six or seven times already.

I'll have a chance to give it at least one more read through before I head off next Thursday to do an event with Manda Scott at the Transworld LitFest just outside London, and I already have another few changes in mind. After that, there's only one more stage I'm involved in, the final proof read, and the next time I see it, it will look like this.

Reviews: the dark side

2011-03-03T06:42:00.000-08:00

Just a short rant on the subject of reviews again. I was interested in a new book by a Scottish writer that has barely been out for a couple of days and I took a look to see how it was doing on Amazon, as one does when one should be writing.

It was performing pretty well for a debut novelist, which is encouraging for everyone. But I was surprised to see that barely a day after it was out it already had three reviews, all of them five stars, all of them raving about the book and the writer, and all of them written on the same day. The opening lines read:

A page turner from the very beginning.
It made me sit up right from the start.
I was gripped from the start.

The first was by someone who had only ever written a single review, which is always a bit suspicious, but it was the second and third that really got my hackles up. The second reviewer had written seven reviews. Every single one of them was five stars, with not a single flaw to be found in any of the books, and even more incredibly every single book had been published by the same Scottish publishing house. Lo and behold, the third reviewer had written thirteen five star reviews for books by the same publisher as reviewer two.

I think we get the picture. What really annoys me is that I suspect this is a very good novel, by someone who will be a very good author, but I'll never know because I'd never buy a book that seems to be being 'promoted' by something that's the publishing equivalent of a Nigerian inheritance scam. It demeans the writer and it demeans her work and most of all it demeans the people who log on to Amazon expecting to see an honest assessment of the product.

They're our readers and our customers and they deserve better.

Defender of Rome

2011-02-23T09:43:00.000-08:00

You wait six months and suddenly two come along at once.

This is the cover of my new G. Valerius Verrens novel, Defender of Rome, which will be published on August 18. Yet again, the designers and Simon my editor have done a fantastic job of producing a package that really adds impact to the storyline. Brilliant!

The story: Valerius reluctantly agrees to hunt down the leader of a mysterious sect which could undermine the whole social foundation of the Empire. But in Nero's court nothing is what it seems and he's soon drawn into a web of conspiracy, intrigue and betrayal that threatens not only his own life, but that of his family and friends.

As hunter becomes hunted the story races to an explosive climax on the shores of the Bay of Naples.

Castles, forts and the Jackson family tree

2011-02-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

I was seething into my cornflakes this morning while I was reading this article Mystery of lost Ninth solved in the Mail on Sunday. It's a shameless plug for a new TV show, which itself is shameless piggyback on The Eagle, the second Roman film out this year based on Rosemary Sutcliff's novel Eagle of the Ninth. I've never read so much rubbish about the Romans in my life.

I don't mind any historian jumping onto the back of a movie to publicise himself, but this is about as relevant to history as a Kellogs advert. It's full of stuff we either knew already, has been disproved or is just waffle. Rubbish!

Historian Neil Faulkner, of Channel 4’s Time Team, said: ‘My guess is that the Ninth Legion was destroyed in a carefully executed ambush by northern tribes.'

Well my guess is that they were abducted by aliens and it's based on the same amount of evidence.

It almost makes me pine for Neil Oliver.

*

On a more pleasant note I spent four hours getting soaked, muddy and freezing while I was down in the Borders at the weekend. I had a walk round Lanton Wood, which covers the hill overlooking Jedburgh from the north. It was an old stamping ground of my dad's who lived on the farm at Monklaw when he was a boy.

It's an eery place full of muddy tracks and old logging trails and I hadn't realised it was quite so extensive. I was looking for what was supposed to be a Roman camp, but among the trees I came across an old hill fort I'd never even heard of. Then on the far side of the hill I noticed Timpendean Tower, which I've only ever seen from the Hawick Jedburgh road in the valley below. It's not much of a ruin, but when I went to investigate I discovered it's actually part of a much larger defended complex. Some of the banks and ditches even put me in mind of the Romans.

The tower is sixteenth century and belonged to the Douglas's, who held extensive lands around Jedburgh, where Sir James, the Black Douglas, had a stronghold at Lintalee. The earthworks are a lot earlier, probably from around just after the Norman conquest, but a Greek coin of the second century BC was found nearby, so the Romans were probably around here at one point. It was burned down numerous times during the Border wars, most notably by the Earl of Hertford in 1545 during the Rough Wooing, but always rebuilt until it was abandoned in the eighteenth century.

I love hanging about places like this, but eventually I had to move back into the forest, because I had something special I needed to find. Every family needs a family tree. The Jackson family tree is in Lanton Wood. In an act of tender environmental vandalism my dad carved the name of each of his grandchildren and great grandchildren in the bark of a beech tree. It was a long time since I'd visited it and I wasn't sure how I'd feel when I saw it. When I reached the part of the wood where I knew it was, I wished I'd brought a knife to carve his name in it. It was only when I finally found it that I discovered one of my brothers had been there before me.

The Jackson family tree

*
And finally, anyone who has been on my Facebook author site will already have seen this, but this week I got my first look at the front cover if my new thriller, which will be published under the name James Douglas (no connection to the above Black Douglas - my mum had me christened James Douglas Jackson). The subheads will be updated, but I think it's a real winner.

Some people find it odd that I should write across two genres, but the simple answer is that it keeps me fresh and provides a completely different challenge from historical fiction. The Doomsday Testament is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be published on August 18

It's all ancient history now

2011-01-30T06:10:00.000-08:00

Since I started researching and writing my books I've occasionally come across articles that promised great new possibilities, but that wouldn't let me access them unless I coughed up forty dollars or the like. Being on a tight budget (or a cheapskate, take your pick) I balked at paying out cash on the off-chance that I might learn how some Roman tied that loin-cloth thing that passed for underwear in the first century, or confirmation that they may not, in fact, have eaten dormice stuffed with larks tongues. There were a number of these sites, but the main one was something called JSTOR, which is an online repository of academic journals.

So there I was last week, frustrated again, when I looked at the list of institutions who actually do have access and one of them was the National Library of Scotland. Five minutes later I have a virtual library card and I'm in, feeling like a kid who's just found a fiver outside a sweety shop.

So I've spent the last couple of days with academics from Oxford and Harvard and the University of whotsit in Baaden Wurttenberg picking up the kind of nit-picking detail you can't get anywhere else on the planet and loving every dry, dusty mind-numbing minute of it. One of the most interesting things is how seldom articles on similar subjects agree with each other, which finally brings me to the point of this post.

I had an e-mail from a fellow author, James Mace, an American gentleman who writes the Soldier of Rome series, and he made the point that he always sticks as faithfully to known history as possible. Which begged the question: What do we mean by known history when we're talking about half a dozen sources who died two thousand years ago?

Reading my wordy academic works brought home that what we think of as known history is incredibly mixed up and messy. Roman historians, Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio, were writing decades, or in some cases hundreds of years after the events they're recording. Unless they tell you who was consul (and even that isn't 100 per cent reliable) they don't provide dates. Tacitus wasn't big on geography and he had a habit of missing out important detail. Suetonius lumps all the good stuff about an emperor at the start and the bad bits at the end, with no hint at when they happened. Dio pinched passages from earlier writers and added a few juicy bits. All of them will happily put words in their subjects mouths to make a political point, but I've read historians who quote Boudicca's speech before her last battle as if Dio was there taking it down in shorthand and we should believe every word. We don't know if the Boudiccan rebellion was in 59, 60 or 61AD, or if it happened over two weeks or two years. Dio's history of Claudius's invasion of Britain mentions an elephant, which gave me the foundation for my first two books. Fine, maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, but some quite highly regarded historian turned elephant into elephants, and somebody else turned elephants into a squadron of war elephants, which is just plain wrong. Yet kids will read it in their history books and believe it.

What I'm trying to say, in my long-winded way, is that when it comes to ancient Rome we don't know anything. We have sources and we have conflicting opinions about what those sources are saying and what they actually mean to say. We don't have facts, we have supposition and interpretation of tiny pieces of evidence.

So when you're writing historical fiction should you stick rigidly to the facts, or do you just go ahead and use what's there to write a good book and make it as authentic as possible?

I've seen the future and it might just work

2011-01-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

One of the first recommendations at today's Working as a Writer in the 21st Century conference at the Scottish Book Trust in Edinburgh was to keep your websites up to date, so, as you see, I've taken that one on board at least.

It was a day that gave me an enormous amount to think about and increased my confidence that it is actually possible to make a long term living from writing, even in these gloomy times of dwindling advances, closing libraries and smaller publishers' lists.

It started off with a talk from Julian Westaby of Dunning/Creating Sparks who gave the forty or so assembled writers and agents a crash course in how to combine Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr into one big powerful marketing tool for their books and themselves. I'd never considered that either my books or, more importantly, me, lent themselves to video promotions, but by the end of his talk I was thinking how I could combine my love of Roman sites in Scotland with passages from the books to create something that people might be interested in.

Jenny Todd, from Canongate, gave us an insight into how e-books and the internet are changing the publishing industry's whole approach to marketing, with the emphasis on the above video promos, but independent bookseller Rosamund de la Hey and Birlin marketing boss Jan Rutherford made the case for the old-fashioned virtues of getting out there and meeting your customers.

Authors Sara Sheridan, Barry Hutchison and Janet Paisley used their own experiences to prove that there are a host of opportunities for writers beyond books if they'd only get out there and look for them. Everything from writing for TV, radio, the theatre, ghost-writing and hosting individual corporate events with a unique twist.

And finally, Aly Barr from Creative Scotland, Caitrin Armstrong, of the SBT and Borders Book Festival and Booknation boss Alistair Moffat talked about how help and support for writers is just an e-mail away.

So what did I learn? Firstly that its not just enough to write. You have to be proactive, both in your self-promotion and seeking out opportunities. Secondly that you have to be innovative and use every technological tool at your disposal. And thirdly, that with all the dynamism, energy and talent on display it's clear that Scotland's literary world is in good health, good heart and in pretty good shape to take on the challenges of the 21st century.

E-books, pricing and the end of the world as we know it?

2011-01-12T12:28:00.000-08:00

Like everybody else involved with writing and publishing, the subject of e-books has been on my mind. Kindle was the best selling Christmas product on Amazon and more and more people I know seem to be buying e-readers of one sort or another. It's not something I plan to do myself. Mainly because I like proper books. A book for me is a treasure, to be kept for a lifetime and cherished, picked up and read at leisure. Some of them are works of art. It gives me pleasure to own books. I don't see owning a computer file on Kindle ever coming close to that feeling.

On the other hand, books, all kinds of books, are my future, so there's no way I'm going to be able to ignore what's happening.

It was brought home to me when I got my last review for Hero of Rome on Amazon. The reviewer loved the book, but he gave it only four stars because he thought the price was too high on Kindle. Just to ram the point home he got it out of the library instead and tagged it as a lost sale.

I took a look at the comments after some learned American was pontificating on his blog the other day about the future of publishing and if writers could ever be good publishers. His answer seemed to be a resounding No. It seemed a fair question to ask, and a reasonable answer, but just about every comment was on the subject of rip-off pricing of e-books.

Hero of Rome retails at £9.30 on Kindle. Caligula and Claudius just below a fiver. Now, you could argue, fairly, that the price differential is justified because Hero is pretty new and the others have been out for a couple of years. What's more difficult to justify is the differential between the e-book and the print version. A huge amount of investment goes into the printed edition (printing costs, cover design, paper etc.) whereas, and please don't quote me on this, as I understand it an e-book is about a 1MB file that is uploaded and needs a bit of editing. Then again, I doubt that the publishers make much of a profit from each copy of the print version, so there's also an argument that they're perfectly entitled to make a bit more on the electronic version.

The e-book anarchist movement seems to be of the opinion that no e-book should cost more than £1, and you'll find that most of those in the Kindle top 20 are in that price range, many of them by self-published authors who are doing a great job of marketing their books and are getting the lion's share of the price back in profit. That's fine and I don't grudge any writer a penny of what they earn. What worries me is that if Corgi or Bantam are forced to reduce the prices of my books to £1 or less and e-books take over the world, they won't make a profit, there'll be no decent advances, which are already few and far between, and fewer high quality, properly edited, really good books. - oh, and I won't make a living.

So what's the answer? Some sort of compromise probably. But the honest one is that I've no idea. The problem is that neither has anyone else.

Season's Greetings

2010-12-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

First Christmas has passed successfully. Daughter Nikki made it home two hours late from Madrid, but 24 hours ahead of the snowstorm that closed Edinburgh airport to all but departures.

She's off to Canada with her boyfriend Greg (blizzards permitting) on Thursday so an early Christmas celebration was required. It wasn't the traditional Jackson Christmas - we usually have Beef Wellington a la Doug - for some reason she opted for turkey, but it was traditional in most other ways. We had eight people at the dinner table, but we catered for sixteen. The cooks almost came to blows over how to stuff a turkey (who can tell the difference between neck and backside when they're both missing?) and when to start the veg, but despite the surfeit of giant kitchen knives bloodshed was avoided. On the plus side my other daughter Kara's smoked salmon and mackerel pate concoction was undoubtedly dish of the day and will be repeated. Secret Santas were exchanged and Ruaridh's gift of nuclear grade tabasco proved capable of setting fire to the street. It's now en route to Porton Down for examination.

Nikki and Kara: dishes of the day

On a more literary note, mine (courtesy of Gregor) was a winner. I now have a brilliant history of 69AD The Year of the Four Emperors, which would have played a pivotal part in my Hero of Rome, Valerius Verren's life and was probably the most traumatic eighteen months in the Empire's history. Valerius has already become acquainted with two of the main protagonists and he definitely has a role to play. Who knows if it's a story I'll ever write, but it's great to have another story that you are desperate to tell.

The countdown now begins to Christmas proper and the spirit is willing, even though the flesh is a little underwhelmed.

We'll be thinking of absent friends and I hope you will too.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.

You can't judge a book by its cover - or its reviews

2010-12-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

I was going to have two weeks away from the computer, but I only lasted about ten days and to be honest my fingers were itching to be at the keyboard the moment I got back from my weekend in Madrid and from choice, not necessity. You just can't escape the next book.

But it gave me a chance to step back from things and take a slightly more detached view of books and book people. There were a couple of interesting stories in the papers about the Amazon review system, with suggestions that certain writers are planting poor reviews on their rivals' websites. It's not a new accusation; a friend of mine is certain that a much more successful author in the same genre has conducted a prolonged campaign against him under half a dozen different names. Only a couple of months ago the Russian scholar Orlando Figes was forced to apologise for savaging a fellow historian's books on Amazon under a false name.

Then there was the revelation that some publishing companies actually pay to plant glowing reviews of their authors' work on the site. A PR film has cheerfully admitted charging £5,000 for supplying the service, which probably makes it more lucrative to write reviews than most books. I suppose that helps explain why it's amazing how often when you look at a novel's Amazon page the first half a dozen or more five star reviews are followed by a one or two star as the actual paying customers get involved. Sometimes it's because it's the author has asked his mates to post a review if they've enjoyed his book, which I suppose is fair enough. But some writers seem to have a lot more mates than others.

Taken together it makes you wonder if the whole online review system isn't totally flawed.

Not that anything will change. No book publisher is going to take a single step back from the internet when the entire industry is in danger of being sucked into whirling vortex that is the world wide web. And, let's be perfectly honest, for a writer there's nothing better than someone giving their unbiased opinion that you've produced a masterpiece.

The only people who can improve the situation are the book buying public. If the first few pages of each and every book on Amazon were available in preview it would give readers the opportunity to try before they buy and there's no better, honest or more straightforward way of judging a product than that.

What's in a name?

2010-11-14T05:33:00.000-08:00

When I was at a writers' conference recently a top London agent told the assembled literary hopefuls that if they wanted to get a crime novel published the best thing they could do was to put a diagonal line through every O in their name. He was joking, of course, but you only have to look at the number of Scandinavian crime novelists on the shelves to take his point.

By spooky coincidence, I have a couple of crime books sitting about somewhere just waiting for their final polish, but if they're ever published I doubt it will be under my own name. I might go for my recently discovered Serbian nom de plume, Daglas Dzekson, but then again, it could be something completely different. Whether its his real name or not, I don't know, but Harlan Coben caught my eye, and I pondered whether I might call myself Howden Burn, after the cowpat filled, nettle infested valley from which I frequently returned cold, wet, filthy but invariably happy, when I was a kid.

I have a hunch that Howden Burn is the kind of name that would light a fire in the American market, and cracking the American market is every (commercial, and I'm nothing if not commercial) novelist's Holy Grail. The Hardback (yes, I did say Hardback) sales top 10 for 2009 tells you exactly why. Despite the publishing industry's wails, it is still a huge, vibrant and voracious readership with an eclectic appetite that isn't particularly made clear in the list below.

1. The Lost Symbol: A Novel. Dan Brown. Doubleday (5,543,643).
2. *The Associate: A Novel. John Grisham. Doubleday.
3. The Help. Kathryn Stockett. Putnam/Amy Einhorn (1,104,617).
4. I, Alex Cross. James Patterson. Little, Brown (1,040,976).
5. The Last Song. Nicholas Sparks. Grand Central (1,032,829).
6. *Ford County. John Grisham. Doubleday.
7. Finger Lickin' Fifteen. Janet Evanovich. St. Martin's (977,178).
8. The Host: A Novel. Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown (912,165).
9. *Under the Dome. Stephen King. Scribner
10. Pirate Latitudes. Michael Crichton. Harper (855,638).

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

So how do you crack the US? If I knew that, I'd be writing this on a Caribbean beach and not looking out of my spare bedroom window at a dreich, grey monument to the Scottish Calvinist tradition. Clearly, it helps to be American, which, at first glance, you might think is a drawback. But if you're going to lie about your name why not lie about your background? Howden Burn could be a one-legged Californian Vietnam vet who gave up booze and found God before hearing voices in his head that told him to write about a cross-dressing serial killer.

It also helps if you write like an American. I was surprised that Stieg Larsson's Girl series did so well in the US (actually I was surprised it did so well anywhere) because it's written in a very dry, dense style that doesn't appear to fit with the quickfire, snappy prose that Americans seem drawn to - I exempt Dan Brown from that, naturally - although the late lamented Stieg has become a worldwide phenomenon and also coincidentally fits neatly into the third criteria: his books start with The (five out of ten above is a pretty good strike rate).

If anyone has any more sage advice on how to crack America, please let me know. I'm just off to start a gentle rewrite of my next book, but one, The Doomsday Testament. And yes, it would fit very nicely about number 2 or 3.

All the world's a stage

2010-10-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

As a writer, you tend to spend a lot of time on your own. You develop an outer skin that encourages other people to flow off it like a drop of olive oil on a non-stick frying pan. You lose the power to communicate in words of more than one syllable. Yes. No. Tea. Out. You don't need a Do not Disturb sign, because it's written on the back of your head - the only bit of you anyone ever sees.

Then your book comes out and everybody wants to be your friend. The shy, reclusive creature who has just spent six months in solitary and has forgotten what the sun looks like is invited to sign books, speak at events and appear before vast (hopefully) audiences at book festivals.

Suddenly the hermit has to transmute into the performer.

Some take to it quite naturally, for others the process is terrifying and as much fun as a visit to the proctologist. But these days no writer can avoid it, any more than they can avoid writing blogs, keeping their Facebook page turning over or Twittering about things no-one is really interested in

But just how much does a writer have to be an entertainer?

I've come to enjoy talking about my books and the craft of writing, even to large audiences, because generally they're there because they're interested in what I have to say. But I know my limitations. I was at the Manchester Literary Society/Historical Novel Society weekend in Manchester. On the Saturday I appeared on a panel with four women novelists: talented, witty, feisty and clever ... and me. It was great fun, especially when they started to talk about sex and I began to slide down into my seat before the inevitable happened.

'So what was sex like in Roman times?'

Now an entertainer would immediately have recalled that the sex in Caligula was so erotic that his wife thought he must be having an affair. Doug Jackson, author, threw up his hands and said: 'I surrender!' Yes, it got the biggest laugh of the day, but that wasn't the point.

Day two I shared the platform with an Oxford professor who could have doubled as a stand-up comedian, a lovely young Irish fella with the gift of the gab, and a larger than life Viking re-enactor with a beard you could hide a badger in. What do you do? You try to compete in your enthusiastic, earnest, but slightly dull way and just hope you're adding to the mix. And you learn.

Not everyone can be an entertainer, but you have to remember that in all the best comedy partnerships one of them is the straight man.

That'll have to do for me.

No rest for the wicked

2010-10-13T02:59:00.000-07:00

I've been guilty of neglecting the blog for a couple of reasons. The first is that sometimes you have things to say but you're not sure how to say them, which may sound strange for a writer, but in my case is undoubtedly true. Better in this case to say nothing than the wrong thing.

The second is less complicated. I have been hellish busy.

The first draft of Defender of Rome went off to Simon at Transworld a couple of weeks ago, accompanied by the usual angst and soul-searching which is only made worse by the fact that Hero of Rome has been doing so well. You're always conscious that the next book has to be better than those that have gone before and Defender took me out of my comfort zone into murky, sometimes dangerous territory.

At the moment, I'm working on the final chapters of my new thriller The Doomsday Testament, which will also be out in the middle of next year. The plan is to finish Doomsday before the suggestions for the Defender rewrite come back.

In the meantime I was preparing for last night's Booker prize event at Stirling library, which was great fun, but meant reading six quite difficult books in about a fortnight. (Is it the Booker judges who are out of touch with real people or is it me?). I've also been trying to get ready for my big weekend in Manchester. Four events over two days. A debate on the place and popularity of historical fiction, at which I'm the only male in a scarily talented panel that includes Alison Weir, Maria McCann and Robyn Young, a readers' workshop on research techniques, chairing a debate on where historical fiction goes next (any ideas welcome) and another panel with Harry Sidebottom, Robert Low and Ben Kane on violence in books (hopefully it won't come to blows, Bob Low is a scary bloke, especially with a broadsword in his hands).

I'm out of puff just thinking about it.

Oh, and when I was at the library last night they asked me to chair the Stirling launch of Robyn's new book Insurrection (first in a trilogy about Robert the Bruce) on Tuesday at the Tollbooth Theatre.

Truly, there is no rest for the wicked.

Bill Jackson 1929-2010

2010-09-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

My dad had a huge influence on my decision to make a career as a writer, even if I ignored the best bit of advice he gave me. His first contribution - and I can still remember the thrill of it after about half a century - was to introduce me to the library before I was even old enough to be a child member. He'd let me take out books from the children's section on his ticket and began a two or three book a week addiction that has lasted a lifetime.

His second was when I was sixteen, just out of school and had no sense of the direction my life should be going, when he pointed me towards the local newspaper, the Kelso Chronicle and Jedburgh Gazette, which had a vacancy for a junior reporter.

Bill Jackson

He was immensely proud the day I published my first book, Caligula, and probably surprised that he enjoyed it so much, but he recognised the perils that lay ahead when he advised me not to think about giving up the day job. It's to his eternal credit that when I did just that he supported me wholeheartedly in my new career and gave me every encouragement in my writing.

We buried Bill Jackson on Wednesday at a beautiful spot on the hillside overlooking Jedburgh, with views out to the south and east and the hills he loved where generations of my family worked as shepherds. He took ill on holiday and spent eleven weeks in hospital but for the first eight none of us had any idea just how sick he was. In the end he was told it was 'dialysis or die', but when it became clear the dialysis was only delaying the inevitable he took the decision to let nature take its course. The day after they unhooked him from the machine he almost looked his old self, and the family had a lovely day reminiscing about old holidays and memories; his mind was sharp and his sense of humour as keen as ever. He died the next day and the courage and serenity with which he approached the end humbled all of us who witnessed it. His last words were: I'm going home.'

With eery aforethought, a few months before his death he'd given me a 32-page history of his early years growing up on a farm near Jedburgh during the Second World War. It was only then that I learned he'd shipped out as a cabin boy on a merchant ship at the age of sixteen and had seen Canada, the United States and Brazil before he was eighteen. I'd known that he'd served in Malaya in the fifties, but he'd never told me about the jungle patrols he led with his bren gun, the ambushes in which his friends died, or the regret that he hadn't been able to save them.

I gave the eulogy in St. Mary's Church, Jedburgh, and all the time I was talking I could swear he was at my shoulder. I'll miss him.

The world's at your fingertips

2010-09-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite bits about writing books is doing the research to build or rebuild the world the characters lived in. From reading the histories of Tacitus or Caesar to try to get a handle on the thought processes in ancient times or the rhythm of their speech patterns, to discovering how they baked bread, carried their swords or wore their clothes; every little item of information can add that little touch of authenticity that makes all the difference.

There are two different types of research: research on the ground and research of the historical sources. When I wrote my first book, Caligula, I did a huge amount of reading to immerse myself in the Roman world, but the physical Rome I built was constructed from a map I discovered on the internet. I only visited the forum properly for the first time when the book was complete and it was wonderful to find that the scale and the topography was just as I imagined it. Claudius was different, because it meant taking vague snippets of information about a battle and recreating something close to the reality using all the military sources I could lay my hands on. The Colchester of Hero of Rome was the first time I was able to actually visit somewhere before I wrote about it, and being able to see the topography and imagine it as it was two thousand years ago was invaluable for creating the big scenes like the arrival of Boudicca's army and the fighting that followed. That said, the Colonia of Valerius's time would not have been the place it is without the help of Philip Crummy's superb book City of Victory.

Research can take you to some of the world's wonderful places

I'd love to do more research on the ground, but for various reasons that's not possible. A friend of mine who's researching a new book is off on an exotic three week trip to one of the world's most fascinating places and I'm extremely jealous. Part of one of my forthcoming books takes place in Germany and it would have been great to have done something similar. Instead, I had to turn to my old friend the internet. One of my excuses for not writing books was that I would never have had the time or the money to discover the information I needed to make it work. That's all past now. Google satellite maps and Google earth allow you not just to have a bird's eye view, but to actually walk the streets. If you want to visit a forest or a valley, someone will have posted their holiday snaps on Flickr or Facebook and with luck written a blog to tell you about the biting insects and the smelly sewage plant next door. All you have to do is use your imagination to fill in the gaps.

Of course, there is no substitute for being there and experiencing it yourself, and I'd much prefer to be swanning around the Bavarian Alps for a couple of weeks than sitting in front of this computer. But there's no longer an excuse for saying 'I can't, because ...'

Write what you (don't) know

2010-08-21T05:25:00.000-07:00

Quite often when I'm chatting to people they'll turn round and tell me that they've always wanted to write a book, and the next question, naturally, is: What would you write about? Disappointingly, nine times out of ten the answer is: Me.

The most trumpeted advice on where to start writing a novel is WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. It's also the worst piece of advice I've ever heard.

How many of us 'know' things that other people would be willing to pay to read about? Unless you're very fortunate, your life will have been a mixture of work, eating, sleeping, looking after the kids, with just enough excitement (holidays) and melodrama (holidays/falling out with other family members) to keep it from being too boring. When I started to think about writing a book the first decision I made was not to write about what I knew. Fiction is about pure invention and using your imagination to write about what you don't know.

Of course, some people can get away with writing, or not writing, about what they know. Katie Price began her career as an author by not writing at least three of her four biographies, before turning to fiction and not writing a string of best-selling chick-lit novels that have added to her prodigious fortune. If you've lost an arm and a leg to frostbite on some Himalayan peak or to a crocodile in the farthest reaches of a Bornean swamp there's a fair chance someone will be interested in your suffering and the scent of gas gangrene before breakfast. Leslie Thomas used the defining moment in his life to write a book called The Virgin Soldiers about conscription in Malaya and didn't do too badly. Ditto Andy McNab. But generally, for mere mortals who haven't risked their neck on the field of battle, writing what you know isn't a good idea

A lot of very good writers have fallen into the Write What You Know trap, usually in their first and worst book. The main character's life will miraculously mirror their own and the mundane minutiae of their lives will inevitably put the brakes on the pace until it resembles that of a geriatric three-legged tortoise. Many more will have a Write What You Know manuscript festering away in a drawer that requires a clothes-peg over the nose to extract.

Then again, maybe it's a stage you have to go through, like puberty or hankering to play golf? I've just remembered that the first piece of serious fiction I ever wrote was a story about the death of an old man who'd lost his nose at Gallipoli and a young boy brought up in the sixties pinching apples, aping his comic book heroes and guddling trout. It wasn't very good, but I enjoyed writing it and I suppose, in a way, it was a tribute to my grandad and the comrades who were less lucky than he was.

Maybe you just have to get it out of your system.

The Lost Fort

2010-08-11T03:38:00.000-07:00

Beneath the school playground are the remains of Agricola's Lost Fort

ONE of the questions I’m most frequently asked is: Why did you choose the Romans? The answer’s simple. Dip your toe in the Roman Empire at any point over a period of a thousand years and you will find some fascinating event or some personality with the potential to provide you with a book.

From the early Republic through Julius Caesar to Caligula and on to Tiberius Constantine in the sixth century every period has a tale to tell. And we’re still learning about them.

That was what took me to Doune on Saturday for the archaeological dig open day at Doune Primary School. We know of literally hundreds of Roman sites in Scotland from Pennymuir in the Cheviots to Cawdor outside Inverness, but the fort at Doune wasn’t discovered until 1983 when cropmarks showed the outline of its defences.

It’s in a classic elevated position guarding an important river crossing of the Teith only a few hundred yards from Doune Castle and would have dominated the surrounding area. Plans for building work at the primary school mean part of the complex will be lost when the foundations are dug, so a team from Headland Archaeology have been carrying out intensive investigations in what was the playground. They’ve made some fantastic finds, the jewel in the crown of which is a wonderful enamel-inlayed bronze mount for a horse harness of a type that hasn’t previously been seen in Scotland.

Doune is a classic Roman fort in a
strategic position above a river crossing

Archaeologist Paul gave me a tour of the site, along with a dozen other interested locals, showing the defensive ditches, the interior roadway and the pits which provided most of the finds. Only a small section of the fort has been investigated, but the foundations of several wooden buildings have been uncovered and it was amazing to think that what we were seeing had lain forgotten for two thousand years.

Doune would have played a key role in governor Julius Agricola’s invasion of Scotland around 84AD. Agricola’s campaign was recorded by his son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, and we know he spent six years subduing first the druids on Mona (Anglesey), then the Brigantes in northern England, before finally turning his sights on the troublesome Caledonian tribes. The governor’ three legions pushed relentlessly northwards until they finally brought the Caledonian alliance to battle at Mons Graupius, in Aberdeenshire. The Romans were heavily outnumbered but, in a one-sided contest, Tacitus claims the northern tribes suffered 10,000 casualties and the Roman auxiliaries less than four hundred. Only a single Roman citizen died.

Agricola drove the survivors into the mountains, but didn’t follow them. Doune appears to be one of the so-called glen-blocking forts which were built in the years after Mons Graupius to ensure the Caledonians were kept bottled up in their Highland hideaways. It would have been garrisoned by auxiliary troops, possibly Tungrians or Batavians, but Agricola is also known to have been accompanied by British auxiliaries, and was only occupied for a decade at most.

When the Romans withdrew from Scotland (Tacitus accused the Emperor Domitian of throwing away everything Agricola had won) the palisades were removed, the buildings destroyed and the Roman fort at Doune was lost to memory.

Until now.

One of the finds: a piece of decorated horse harness

The first year

2010-07-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

A year ago I took the brave/mad/exciting decision to write full time and when I look back I wonder if I've done the blog and my readers justice. There's something about gambling everything on a dream that prompts a tendency to reticence, probably with good reason because your mood tends to fluctuate a lot more between wishful fantasy and confidence-shredding gloom. Now I feel I owe my fellow writers a little more insight into what it's been like to go it alone.

Hero of Rome was launched a year to the day after I left The Scotsman. It seems to be doing very well and Caligula and Claudius are both benefitting from its success, particularly Caligula. So how does it feel twelve months on?

In retrospect it was indeed a moment of madness when I left the paper, a heady brew of rash optimism and not quite reckless risk after nine years in an albeit high-stress comfort zone, driven by the new three book deal that begins with Hero of Rome. The economic climate couldn't have been worse, but the possibilities were limitless and it was a chance to walk through a door that might never be open again. I can honestly say I haven't experienced a single moment of regret.

I've been introduced to great people I would never have met, some of whom have become friends. I've appeared at the Borders, Stirling and Wigtown Book Festivals. I've been to jail twice and Saltcoats once. I've had time to write two books and come up with ideas for half a dozen more. I've seen more of my wonderfully supportive family in the past twelve months than I had in the previous five years and had the freedom to come and go as I choose after about twenty years of repetitive routine.

I've learned a few valuable lessons on the way that might be of interest if you're thinking of following the same path.

TAKE a deep breath before you jump. Looking back, I probably got carried away by the moment and the decision deserved a little more reasoned consideration.

BE prepared to lead the life of a Trappist monk, writing is an incredibly solitary profession. No little cosy chats with your colleagues to reassure you how well you're doing.

DO get yourself a proper writing space where you can be free from distractions.

REALISE that the two most important people in your working world will be your editor and your agent, in whom you must have absolute faith, because they are the foundations of your future and that of your family.

ACCEPT that your financial forecast will be wildly optimistic. A year down the line, that nest-egg looks very different in reality to what it did on paper. A little voice will whisper in your ear: Do you admit defeat with six months in the bank? Or three? Or do you go down to the wire?

HAVE a plan, but be prepared to be flexible. If A doesn't work, B might, or C or ...

IDEAS are your currency. Never throw any away. Even if it isn't accepted this year or next it may come good somewhere down the line.

BEWARE Facebook and other such social networks because they can have a corrosive effect on your capacity to work, but also embrace them because they can give you a great marketing platform.

FEAR of failure will be your constant companion but you can't let it dominate you.

ACCEPT that you will suffer Writer's Block at some point. I thought I was immune, but I wasn't and it was the most frightening week I've had so far.

CELEBRATE every triumph, try to ignore every setback.

RELISH the chance to begin each new book and new chapter, because others don't get the opportunity.

REMEMBER that it's all been worthwhile.

University challenged

2010-07-04T07:26:00.000-07:00

It was my daughter Nikki's graduation from Stirling University on Wednesday and I sat in the cavernous tennis hall along with my wife and several hundred other proud parents to celebrate her achievement.
As the long ranks of students marched onto the stage to be capped by the Chancellor, James Naughtie, I found myself trying to compute the combined intellect and effort that had gone into the four hundred or so degrees being conferred. We all laugh at the stereotypical student lifestyle, but I've witnessed the amount of hours and work she put in, the tears and frustration when things weren't going well and the pure joy and relief of a high mark. Whatever benefits they get from their effort are thoroughly deserved.

I was hugely proud when Nikki received her degree, but the moment was also touched by a certain sadness because it means she'll soon be leaving home, and, if I'm honest, guilt. Why hadn't I ever achieved what she just had?

I've never felt handicapped by the fact that I left school with six of what were then called 'O' levels. When you're in a working environment and there's a deadline to hit, nobody's bothered if you went to university as long as you put in the hours and you're good at your job. I could probably argue with some justification that, at the time, in the early 70s, people from where I came from, with my background, just didn't expect to go to university. Then again the sixteen year old me was hardly a paragon of work and ambition. As it is, I've been incredibly fortunate in my career and my life. But just lately I've been wondering: what if?

Would I be a better writer and storyteller if I'd been subjected to the intellectual rigours of university? Would I have written at all? I suppose the answer is that I'll never know and maybe that's for the best.

One thing I don't need a degree to work out: thunderstorm + Victorian house = leak in roof.

Where's that bucket?

'My' hill fort

2010-06-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Took a walk today up to the little hill fort between Bridge of Allan and Dunblane. It had just stopped raining and the day was very fresh, with water dripping from the leaves and into the sun-dappled undergrowth. Trees have long since covered the fort and when you walk through them it's a bit like being in the cloisters of an ancient abbey; you feel immensely close to the people who once lived their in the huts that are now only shallow overgrown pits in the earth. While I was there I went a little further, to what I think of as the King's Grave. It's not marked on any maps but if you look closely you can see a perfectly round, slightly raised mound encircled by large stones, some of which are now missing. I couldn't help thinking that two or three millenia ago people had gone to a huge amount of effort to ensure that the man or woman who was buried here would never be forgotten, yet their name hasn't been spoken for at least two thousand years. The life they lived and the landscape they lived in is gone forever, apart from a tree-covered hill that's now shared by rabbits and badgers, and an almost invisible shadow in the bracken that marks their final resting place. One day, maybe I'll try to tell the story of this haunting place.

On the way to the fort I watched three soaring buzzards being harassed by a single angry crow in a kind of aerial dogfight that felt like having a grandstand seat at the Battle of Britain. The crow would fight for altitude and then come bombing down its target, which would turn in mid-air to meet the attacker with its hooked claws. Time and time again the bird came back, but the buzzards went serenely about their business with just the occasional shriek of outrage.

A little later I spent fifteen minutes in a staring match with two roe deer, a buck and a doe, in the field next to me. I'd spotted the doe easily enough because of her red colour, which at first made me think she was a fox. The buck was perfectly camouflaged against the brown of the patch of bracken he was foraging in. Eventually I moved and the buck gave three barks and the pair of them went racing across the field in elegant bounds and disappeared into the trees.

The Middle Eastern gentlemen who own this land want to turn it into a golf course, with the obligatory hotel and the housing that means that when the golf course and hotel go bust in twenty five years they'll be able to have the whole hill zoned for residential use. They've allowed perfectly workable fields to run wild so they can claim that the land is no longer economic for farming. At the moment it's a paradise for wildlife and walkers but in a few years you'll only be allowed on it after you've paid your green fees.

Isn't it a joy to watch market forces at work?

New look

2010-06-11T06:13:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd try something a little more modern and fresher. I quite fancied using one of the books as the background pic but couldn't figure out how. Anyway, I like it.

Hood-winked

2010-06-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear Russell, what have you done?

A lot of people have described my first two books, Caligula and Claudius, as cinematic, which hopefully is a compliment, and I keep being asked, jokingly or otherwise, if I have a film deal yet. The answer, if you're interested, is no, although one film company did have a little nibble at Caligula right at the start.

So it was fascinating to read the other week about Victoria Hislop turning down £300,000 from a Hollywood studio for the film rights to her book The Island. Her decision to decline was a matter of principle. She believed that a big studio would take liberties with the book and turn it into something she never intended it to be, instead selling the rights, no doubt for considerably less money, to a Greek TV company who plan to turn it into a mini-series. A very laudable decision that says much about her principles, and just as much about her circumstances.

But back to Russell, fine actor that he is. I went along to see Robin Hood at our local cinema on Sunday, full of anticipation based on the reviews I'd read and the fact that no-one could go wrong with the Hood legend. What I found is that no matter how much money you pour into a film, how much star power you have or how good the director, in this case Ridley Scott who made the fabulous Gladiator along with Crowe, if you don't have a proper narrative your film is destined to be a turkey. Sure, make it gritty and hard and brutal (think the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan). Russell Crowe doesn't do men in tights. Fine. But why completely ignore a brilliant, iconic tale of good against evil and replace it with a story that says nothing except: We're planning a sequel to make use of all this armour and leather gear.

Russell's Robin Hood - and I have no objection to his accent if he'd only make up his mind which one of the four or five to use - isn't sure whether it is trying to be Maximus Hood or Kevin Costner without the coiffure. The problems start, as they do, at the beginning. He's an archer, among the lowest of the low of Richard the Lionheart's crusading (looting) army. Ten minutes later he's landed gentry and handing over dead King Richard's crown to the Queen like he's to the manor born; give him half an hour and he's leading a whole army. Full of action? Yes. Believable? No. Yes, you have to suspend your disbelief when you go to the pictures, but there were moments when I laughed out loud and I'm sure I wasn't supposed to. In Costner's Robin Hood, the supporting cast, Morgan Freeman, Alan Rickman et al, were interesting. In this film, they're cyphers. You know who Will Scarlet is because he's got red hair. Little John is Little John, because he's not er' little. Alan a'Dale plays a mean lute but he doesn't do anything else.

Ah, I hear you say, but surely the winsome Cate Blanchett must save the day? Well she does, in a manner of speaking, at the end (that was the bit where I put my head in my hands) but the screen chemistry between the two leads is about as interesting as a Primary Two litmus test. Throw in an unlikely storyline about Rob's dad writing the original Magna Carta, a Prince John who's about as camp as a two-man tent and the longest 'Nnnnnnnnoooooooohhhhhhh!' in mainstream movie history and you have a film that's lost in the wilderness and not coming out for a long, long time.

If you don't want to know what happens at the end, please stop reading here.

Poor Cate, you could almost feel her cringing when, at the start of the final climactic battle scene (see Saving Private Ryan above), some idiot decided it would be a good idea to have her ride into the battle line in full armour, leading the bunch of ten-year-olds who'd up until this point only ever haunted Sherwood Forest like little pointless ghosts. Now they slaughter fully kitted up French men-at-arms with the aid of their little, but lethal, pen knives. Please God, let it finish here. But I doubt it will. Robin will be back for Hood Two, hopefully with better scriptwriters.

So there's undoubtedly danger in selling your book to some mega-bucks, megalomaniac Hollywood producer (I know Robin Hood is a legend, not a book, but I'm trying to make a point) and they turn out Caligula: the Musical with Darius as the lead, or Claudius meets Godzilla. Does that mean I will follow Victoria Hislop's lead and put artistic integrity above profit? Well, I'll probably take about ten seconds to think about it, but I fear that when the phone call comes I will reluctantly park my principles in a safe place until such time as I can actually afford to have them.

Rewriting history

2010-06-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

I read that historian of the moment Niall Ferguson has been pontificating about historical fiction to the literatti at the Hay on Wye festival. (see Charlotte Higgins www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jun/01/fictionalising-historical-figures-hay-festival). Apparently he no longer reads the kind of books I write because they 'contaminate historical understanding'; the premise presumably being that when a historical novelist puts words into the mouth of one of his non-fictional characters he is somehow distorting the historical record. Likewise he warns against historians inferring beyond the written record 'or else this takes you into the realm of romantic fiction, a world I shall never enter.' What a dull life the man must lead.

I've always felt a bit sorry for 'proper' historians who believe they have to stay within the strict parameters of the evidence and aren't allowed to use their imagination. Some of the best and most readable works on the subject have been by people prepared to break free of that restriction. Professor Mary Beard's Pompeii: The life of a Roman Town is a great book because she's confident enough in her subject to look at the evidence and allow her imagination to take her back 2,000 years. That doesn't make her a bad historian, just a good writer. In Before Scotland, Alistair Moffat writes about a time for which we have no written record, but uses the landscape, etymology, and his imagination, to revisit and recreate a fascinating true Dark Age.

Historians like Mr Ferguson make a living out of re-evaluating history, which is fine if you have a large anthology of written work to start with. Quite often all they achieve is to see what others have seen before them, only to cry out that they've discovered something everyone else has missed, not because it is new, but because they're looking at it through the prism of their own, modern, age. The written record can also be dangerous ground, particularly when it is taken literally. Our knowledge of early Rome is based on only a handful of writers, each of whose work has been, to a greater or lesser extent, 'contaminated' by the times they lived in. Pragmatism meant they could only say so much, and in a certain way. Tacitus and Cassius Dio put words in the mouths of Rome's defeated enemies of a hundred years earlier that sent messages to the readers of their own time. Nobody in their right mind thinks those words were actually spoken.

People who read historical fiction are intelligent enough to understand that what they are reading is just that: fiction. Our knowledge of Boudicca, Calgacus and Caratacus, the three great British heroes of early history, exists only because of the way their defeats reflected on Rome. They play bit parts in large stories and we know little or nothing about the reality of their lives. Does that mean we have to ignore them? Of course not. When, in Claudius, I sat Caratacus down in a mud hut with the leaders of southern Britain, I was attempting to recreate the atmosphere of the times not write a history of them. Likewise, when Valerius looks across the river Colne at the seething horde of Boudicca's army in Hero of Rome, I used my imagination. Yet, in some form, if not in the way I actually portray them, both these events must have happened and I make no apologies for using them to inform, and to entertain. Because, unlike Niall Ferguson, we scribblers of historical fiction are in the entertainment business as much as the literary.
We know our place.

Of life and death

2010-05-26T01:07:00.000-07:00

I've had three brushes with mortality over the past couple of weeks; three small tragedies which barely made a ripple on the world but which I think sum up three different attitudes, or perhaps that should be approaches, to life and to death.

The first was a relentlessly cheerful and old fashioned lady who lived quietly in the small Borders village where my wife grew up. She stayed in a council house and survived on very little but wanted nothing more, thriving on contact with her large, widespread family. At the age of eighty five she cleaned the local bowling club, attended the village church every Sunday and spent much of her time visiting and caring for neighbours and friends who were less sprightly than herself. A couple of weeks ago she went for her usual Friday game of bowls and into the club for a cup of tea and a chat before collapsing. The doctor said she had suffered a brain aneurism and after the family had the opportunity to say goodbye her life support was switched off.
The funeral took place on the first proper day of summer in the village churchyard just a few yards from where Beatrix Potter's brother is buried. Afterwards, when I spoke to her sons and daughters they insisted that she had always said the way she died, virtually gone in a few heartbeats, was the way she had wanted to go, and that, despite their grief, they were happy she had been given her wish.

The second came on Sunday, while we were in Edinburgh watching my daughter Nikki compete in the Edinburgh half-marathon. When we got back to the friends' where we were staying my eldest daughter Kara got a phone call informing her that a girl who grew up with her boyfriend had died suddenly. In the old cliche, she had everything to live for. At the age of 23, she was about to graduate with an arts degree and was intelligent, talented, beautiful and loved by everyone who came into contact with her. Unfortunately, all that means nothing when you suffer from depression. One morning she woke up and decided she could no longer live with the person she believed she was and took her own life.

The third was a man with a genuine lust for life. At his funeral on Monday more than 2,000 people turned out to say goodbye, far to many for the little church at Blairlogie in the shadow of the Ochil Hills, and we stood outside in the sunshine, with the birds singing in the trees and listened to a ceremony that was in turns poignant, comic and tragic. Again, he had everything to live for. A wonderful wife and a son who was his absolute pride. He ran his own welding business and bred and showed Highland cattle and was a stalwart of the local rugby club. Somehow he managed to find time to chair half a dozen different societies and every meeting must have been hilarious. In his time he'd been a hell-traiser, but in the nicest possible way. Two years ago, at the age of 49, he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. The doctors told his wife, a full time school teacher, that he had only a few weeks to live. From that moment onwards he fought for every moment to win another day with his family and never stopped fighting until the frailties of his body overcame the strength of his spirit.

I thought his wife's summing up of his approach to those final two years was worth sharing.

Remember yesterday, dream about tomorrow, but live for today.

Never forget

2010-04-30T04:29:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about my new existence is getting out to meet interesting people, whether it's in a prison or at a book festival. It happened last night when I had the pleasure and the privilege to meet an extraordinary character whose story of has captivated thousands of people.

Alistair on a visit to the US, where he met veterans of the USS Pampanito, which sank the hell ship he was trapped in

As a journalist one of the first things you are told is not to use the word miracle, but I make no apologies for describing Alistair Urquhart as a walking miracle. Alistair, from Aberdeen, survived the fall of Singapore and was captured by the Japanese in February 1942. He was forced to build the Burma Railway on a handful of rice a day and with men dying like flies around him, survived cholera, dysentery and beriberi, was locked in the hold of a Death Ship with five hundred men, some of whom resorted to cannibalism to stay alive, torpedoed and finally held in Japan where on 9 August 1945 he felt the blast wave of the Nagasaki bomb.

His book, The Forgotten Highlander, was published in October, shot to the No. 1 slot in the Sunday Times non-fiction list and is already in its fifth reprint. I'd been asked to chair an event he was doing at Stirling University's MacRobert Theatre. At 91, and still with the scars of the beatings he received, he's a ball of energy who kept an audience of three hundred spellbound for an hour and a half. His harrowing story, told with brutal honesty, had many in tears.

There are two shameful threads to The Forgotten Highlander. The first is his treatment at the hands of the Japanese who kept their prisoners in appalling conditions that killed many of his compatriots. The stories of casual beatings, horrific executions and systematic, agonising torture are a terrible indictment against a nation which has never truly acknowledged its guilt.

The second is his disgraceful treatment on his release by the British government which had sent him to war so inadequately prepared in the first place. Like thousands of others he was forced to sign a declaration swearing he would never talk about his ordeal. He was sent home by a circuitous route and arrived back in Britain to no formal welcome or acknowledgement of his suffering. Incredibly, when he received his back pay the authorities had deducted money for his keep. This from a man who had slept outdoors to avoid the bugs in the hut he had built himself and lived on grains of weevily rice for three years. And in a final insult he was refused a disability pension because he couldn't provide the records to prove he'd suffered from the diseases and beatings he claimed.

His disgust at the way he was treated by his government is still palpable after almost seventy years. Nor will he ever forgive or forget his treatment at the hands of the Japanese, who he still believes have never learned the lessons of World War Two.

Alistair only wrote his memoirs with reluctance, but when he recognised its astonishing success he saw the opportunity to launch a crusade to ensure that future generations would never forget those who suffered so much for their country and who received so little in return. In the most literal sense his book has given this amazing old gentleman a new lease of life.

If you haven't read The Forgotten Highlander, you should. Some things should never be forgotten.

www.amazon.co.uk/Forgotten-Highlander-Incredible-Survival-During/dp/1408702118/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272627254&sr=1-1-spell

Pirates off the starboard bow

2010-04-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

At the end of last week I did a search for my books on Google, as you do, to see if any of them had been recently reviewed.

What I discovered came as a total shock. My first book, Caligula, appeared on dozens and dozens of new sites and every one of them was offering it as a free illegal download. How does this happen? I have no idea, but it came very soon after the book was released on Kindle in the US and most of the sites were US based.

According to the numbers on one site Caligula had been downloaded 30,000 times. Multiply that by ten or twenty and the figures are astonishing. Yet the author, who has invested a huge amount of time and effort and more importantly, the publisher, who has invested enormous amounts of money to turn a gem of an idea into reality, don't get a single penny.

I did a little research on the subject and discovered that a lot of people on the web think it's great fun and something to take advantage of. But the figures are astonishing. A study in the United States into a thousand published books in different genres found that over nine million pirated book copies have been downloaded. They estimate that this represents total losses to the already hard-pressed publishing industry of almost three billion dollars. Online piracy now adds up to around ten per cent of total US book sales.

A few years back I used to laugh at the big name stars who moaned about their music being downloaded illegally. Now I know how it feels. As if you've been mugged.

Sure, you can argue that Caligula has now been seen by several thousand people who probably wouldn't have paid to read it, and maybe I have a wider fan base than I had before, but that doesn't help the book's sales figures or my chances of getting the new book deals that are now my lifeblood. The internet is a huge part of all our lives, and its impact will undoubtedly become even more significant in the coming years. But it can break as well as make. As a journalist I'm not generally in favour of censorship, but surely its about time to introduce some form of international regulation to control what appears on the web and how its used.

The net is a wonderful phenomenon, we shouldn't allow it to continue to be a breeding ground for crooks, terrorists and perverts.

Hitting a century

2010-04-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've just noticed that my last post was the hundredth blog I'd written, so it should probably have been about something a little more groundbreaking and important than my writing jumper. Last night I took the chance to have a look at the original postings way back in 2007 and in a lot of ways I achieved what I set out to do, although it didn't feel like it at the time when I was only painting a tiny corner of the picture with each post. I wanted to give people a chance to experience the run up to my first book and all the highs and lows that a first-time novelist goes through; the excitement and the hunger for the next bit of progress and the fear that it isn't going to happen. Hopefully I managed it.

I thought I'd be a little bit lazy and just post that first blog entry again, because the last sentence is a bit of gypsy prophecy that has certainly come true so far.

Sunday, 16 December 2007

COUNTDOWN TO CALIGULA

Hi, my first book, Caligula, is being published in July and it occurred to me people might be interested in the highs and lows of a debut novelist.

I'm Doug Jackson, a writer and journalist from Scotland. I've been writing for three or four years now and been fortunate enough to land a two book deal with Transworld publishers. My first novel Caligula comes out on 14 July. I know there's a large community of people out there with the ambition to be novelists, and I thought my experiences might be interesting and hopefully helpful to them.

THE STORY SO FAR

I was having lunch one day with a friend - Nicola Barry a newspaper columnist whose own book Mother's Ruin was published this year. She was doing the MLitt course at Glasgow University and while we were chatting she suddenly said: 'You should write a book. I bet it would be really gritty'. So I thought, OK I will.

I didn't start out to write a book about Caligula, I started writing a book about an Emperor's elephant - or at least the slave who brought it to Britain. I've always been interested in history. When I was listening to a documentary on the history of Britain in the car and someone told the story of how the Emperor Claudius rode in triumph at Colchester on an elephant it seemed like a worthwhile story to tell.

When I got home I sat in from of the computer and wrote 500 words in an hour. I've been writing or revising just about every day since.

I remember the first sentence I typed, because I was really proud of it. It said: 'My father was a great man. He tamed the wild beasts and made them do his bidding.' Six months later it took me a month to write my way out of the hole that sentence got me into.

You won't find it in Caligula - in fact you won't find any of the first 10,000 words I wrote. They weren't wasted though, every word and piece of research I did brought me closer to the subject; to the people, the sights, the sounds and the smells - the atmosphere - of Rome.

Writing at the end of a 10 to 12 hour day was tough, but I stuck to it until my son got old enough to want to use the computer too. That was when I abandoned the car started a one hour commute on the train to and from work. That allowed me to up my output to between 1200 and 1600 words a day, and suddenly the mathematics of writing seemed a lot friendlier. 1600 words a day x 5 is 8,000 words a week. A novel is around 90,000 words. Working on the train for even two hours a day I could write a first draft in about three months. I was on my way.

I'll end my first blog here. It's going to take longer than I thought to get up to date. Hope you'll stick with me. It's been a rollercoaster so far and I think the best is yet to come.

Suits you, sir!

2010-03-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

Working from home is great, but it still has its pressures, not least the fact you no longer have a man with a whip standing over you shouting that it's time for ramming speed or possibly any speed at all.

Such as: should I have another digestive biscuit with my tea or will it turn me into a fat(ter) b*****d?

Or: should I get up from my computer after less than an hour to take my nineteen-year-old son to work when it's not even raining and he could easily get there in twenty minutes without breaking sweat?

Problems, problems.

Today it's been my writing jumper.

I like my writing jumper. It's dark blue hundred per cent lambswool and I purchased it many years ago from David Thompson and sons of Jedburgh, my favourite shopping emporium. When I bought it, I thought it was just a single solid colour and it wasn't until I got it home that I saw it had 'Pringle' written across the side of it in letters twelve inches high. I still thought it was great until I wore it to a party at New Year and someone turned round, having noticed the letters Pri on the front, and asked me if it stood for Prick.

The jumper spent many New Years after that in exile in a drawer in my wardrobe, but when I started working from home I heard it calling me. It's the perfect writing jumper, really. It fits, in a loose kind of way that doesn't interfere with my typing. It's extremely comfortable and not at all scratchy. And it only has two holes in it.

The problem is that while I like my writing jumper everybody else in the house doesn't. To be honest they think it makes me look a bit of a Pri.

So that's this weeks dilemma. Do I ditch the wondrously crafted piece of kit that's become a tool (if you'll pardon the expression) of my trade or do I continue to rebel against the wishes of my extended family and stick two fingers up to what now counts as the Establishment?

Letters on a postcard to ...

Jail break2

2010-03-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

I had another visit to prison this week, to talk to a group from A wing (security prisoners) at Perth.

It was a real eye-opener and much more forbidding than last week when we met in a small classroom. The one thing I noticed more than anything else is how, on a certain level, the staff, civilian and warders, are as much prisoners as the men they're guarding. 'A' wing is all barred windows and doors, six locks to get you from one area to another and intimidating looking young men standing around in bored suspicious groups. There was also a sense of the prisoners being much more institutionalised.

It was a different kind of discussion from the previous week because literacy levels were probably lower and I kept it very informal, but again the most interesting questions and interventions came from the people you least expected them to.

When we were going up to the little chapel where I was giving the talk, Marianne, the jail's reader in residence, who had invited me, asked a young guy who was cleaning the floor why he wasn't coming. 'Because I think it'll be pants,' he said. She persuaded him to come along and give it a try and at the end he asked me for my autograph and invited me back, which is probably the best validation I've had yet!

The Forgotten Highlander

2010-03-22T15:32:00.000-07:00

I've just been doing some reading for a talk Waterstones have asked me to chair by Alistair Urquhart, whose book The Forgotten Highlander, about his terrible experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore, has been storming the non-fiction sales charts.

Alistair's story is an incredible tale of heroism, hardship and survival under terrible conditions and at the hands of captors whose mercilessness was only outdone by their brutality. Yet it's also the story of the enduring qualities of the human spirit and how man can survive even in the most appalling conditions. Until he wrote his book, Alistair didn't talk about his experiences for sixty years. As a prisoner of the Japanese, he worked on the Burma railway and the infamous bridge over the River Kwai, survived being torpedoed by an American submarine and was finally held at a camp just eleven miles from the Nagasaki nuclear blast. When he returned home his family barely recognised him.

His story reminded me of a couple of people I knew in the early 1970s in Jedburgh; men who were old before their time, had suffered crippling injuries and who seldom spoke to anyone outside their immediate family. It wasn't until years later that I realised that they too had been prisoners in the Far East and had never recovered from their time in captivity. Neither of them lived long enough to collect the £10,000 the British government was eventually shamed into handing over as compensation to the survivors in the year 2000.

The venue for the event has still to be sorted out but I'm really looking forward to meeting this remarkable ninety-year-old who somehow manages to find positives in what he went through, despite never having fully recovered from the events of more than half a century ago.

Jail break

2010-03-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

I've just got back from Perth prison and an afternoon giving a talk to ten prisoners about writing and Romans. The guys were a great audience, asked some very perceptive questions and generally appreciated me being there.
I even got a laugh when I told them writing Caligula had been like digging an escape tunnel from The Scotsman.
It's a grim place though, based around a prison for French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars, and just walking through rabbit warrens of corridors bounded by twenty-foot high walls topped by razor wire gave a real sense of being in another world. I've heard all the arguments about prisons being cushy these days, but the loss of personal freedoms, like freedom of movement and freedom of choice, and deprivation of liberty, shouldn't be underestimated. If prison is supposed to be a deterrent it looked as if it was doing a good job.
The talk was part of a series I'm doing under the auspices of the Scottish Book Trust and I'll be doing another three across the country over the next month or so.

Guilty pleasures

2010-03-03T14:33:00.000-08:00

When you give up what has been your life to become a writer you hope for the best and know you'll just have to deal with all the baggage that comes with your decision.

What you can't prepare for, because nobody's warned you about it or written about it, is the guilt.

Just after Christmas I had a couple of weeks off to concentrate on research and some new ideas I'd come up with. It was a perfectly professional thing to do and what I achieved in that couple of weeks will hopefully one day help to deal with the aforesaid baggage. So why did I wake up every morning feeling guilty that I wasn't working? All day long my fingers would be itching to get back to the keyboard and start pounding away. My brain would be telling itself it couldn't afford to be taking this holiday.

It might be a hangover from the days in a structured working environment when, to a certain extent, if you weren't working you weren't earning. But the real answer, I think, is something I suspect just about every writer, no matter how successful, faces: the fear that if you stay away from a book for too long you might lose whatever it is that made you a writer in the first place.

When I finally got down to the serious job of writing my next book I felt a huge sense of relief when, after the usual jumpy start, the paragraphs started flowing and the characters formed in my head and began talking to me the way they sometimes do. It doesn't matter that I'll be more or less chained to the keyboard for the next X months, or that when I finally get up off the writing chair at night after X hours and X thousand words I'll be completely knackered. Because at this moment I'm still a writer.

Argyll odyssey

2010-02-19T07:34:00.000-08:00

I've just returned from a couple of invigorating days in Kidnapped country. The first time I read Robert Louis Stevenson's novel was forty-odd years ago, when I was about ten, but the last was less than a year ago, and the passage of time hadn't made any sort of dent in my enjoyment of the book. It's one of the ultimate adventure stories and about time someone made a decent film of it (with apologies to Michael Caine, the ultimate Cockney highlander). At its heart is the Appin murder, and it was to Port Appin in Argyll that we headed on Wednesday, undaunted by severe weather warnings and promises of blizzards.

Kidnapped is also a brilliant travelogue, cataloguing Scotland's wild places with vivid imagery as David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart make their way from Mull to Edinburgh through the Highlands and the Trossachs. I'd always been captivated by those descriptions and I recalled them as we travelled north and west, through Callander and Balquhidder, Lochearnhead and Crianlarich and on, by the pass of Brander, with every turn producing a view to take your breath away and fill your head with words like 'majestic' and 'grandeur' and snow covered peaks with unpronounceable names passing by like enormous milestones marking the way.

Port Appin started out as just a speck on a map, but I doubt I'll ever forget the 48 hours we spent there, much of it staring out over the Lynn of Lorn towards the golden Isle of Lismore and beyond to the sunlit, white-capped vastness of the Morvern and Ardnamurchan peninsulas. We had a room at the Pierhouse Hotel, built around the old ferrymaster's cottage; the kind of place where, if you're fortunate, you can look out of your window and watch a cormorant drying his wings on an old buoy or see a seal playing in the shallows. The oysters came daily from beds around the island fifteen minutes away over the sea, and if you fancied lobster you could choose it from the creel dangling off the end of the pier. Bridge of Allan, where I live, is hardly a bustling metropolis, but walk the Appin woods and you experience a silence that's almost spiritual; a stillness that has the potential to either drive you mad or seduce you into staying forever.

This year was always going to be a holiday at home kind of year, but I now realise it won't be a hardship, just the opposite.

One step at a time

2010-02-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Jeff, who e-mails me occasionally about writing and books, asked me last week which has been the most difficult book to write and said he suspected it was probably the first one, where you put in the hard slog of turning out upwards of a hundred thousand words without any real hope of it ever getting into print.

His question made me look back at the motivation for writing what started off as The Emperor's Elephant and how things have changed since Caligula was published and again since I decided to try to make a living by writing full time. Each book actually creates a different mental and psychological challenge as opposed to the endeavour, time and imagination you put into it.

Firstly, I think Jeff's wrong. The first book is the easiest to write, because when you're writing it you're totally free from expectation: deep down you know the chances of anyone else ever reading it are as likely as winning the lottery. You can dream, but you don't have to prove anything to anyone except yourself. I wrote The Emperor's Elephant because I enjoyed writing, because I liked the subject, because I was pretty certain I could write a book of some kind and because I found that writing it provided me with the kind of escape that reading books has given me over the years.

When a publisher asked me to turn the first part of The Emperor's Elephant into what became Caligula, I had the motivation of proving to myself I wasn't just a writer; if I could pull this off I was actually on the way to being a novelist. Again, when the book was accepted there was the excitement of being part of a team and the pure adrenalin of knowing you were going to have a first book published.

Claudius, the second book was different, because now there was a weight of expectation which hadn't existed before. Claudius didn't just have to be as good as Caligula, it had to be better. I'd clawed my way through the glass ceiling and now I had to prove I was worthy of staying there.

A few months later came the pure exhilaration of a second deal to write three more books, followed immediately by the horrible knowledge that I was already behind schedule on the first one. I wrote the first forty thousand words of Hero of Rome on the train, knowing that I'd never finish it on deadline unless I went full time, and the next seventy thousand at home knowing that it had to be the best yet, because the rest of my life depended on it.

Now I'm sitting here with a new title on my screen - Defender of Rome - and a new set of problems.

Actually, Jeff, the answer to your question is much simpler ...

The most difficult book will always be the next one.

And the winner is ...

2010-02-01T08:07:00.000-08:00

I've had the opportunity to do a bit of reading for pleasure over the last couple of weeks, as opposed to reading for research, and I managed to get through quite a few books, including Hilary Mantel's Booker prize winner Wolf Hall. Once I got used to the slightly idiosyncratic use of the personal pronoun I really enjoyed her tale of Thomas Cromwell's life at the heart of Henry VIII's court and its portrayal of sixteenth century London. It did, though, leave me puzzling over where an enjoyable, well-written historical novel ends and an award-winning work of literature begins. What makes, for instance, Wolf Hall, a better literary novel than Robert Harris's Lustrum or Tracey Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures? For me, they're both the Booker winner's equal in creating a fascinating picture of remarkable people living in remarkable times.

Anyway, no-one was more pleased than I was to see a top book prize being awarded to a popular work of historical fiction, because, by and large, authors of historical fiction haven't had many prizes to aim at. So I was delighted to read this weekend about a major new prize being launched - and in God's own country too. The £25,000 Sir Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction will be awarded at the Borders Book Festival in June, from a shortlist of UK authors that will be revealed in March.

The Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose family has a long association with Scott, are behind the award and are keen that the great author's name should be linked with such a prestigious prize. It's also a huge coup for the festival's livewire organiser Alistair Moffat and his team and another step towards ensuring that the Melrose-based event is one that nobody who is interested in books can afford to miss.

Farewell to the Voice

2010-01-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

I first met Bill McLaren when I was about ten years old and he was refereeing a fiercely contested rugby match between Hawick Trinity and Parkside Primary School. I have a vague memory of being penalised for foul play in the first minute but he didn't hold it against me.

Bill was already a household name for his unique, couthy commentaries of international rugby matches on the BBC, but it was typical of the man that he was happy to give up his Saturday morning to encourage not just the grass roots of the game, but the tiniest seedlings. As a referee, his fairness was legendary and he carried it over into his commentating and his newspaper reporting. He loved Hawick and Scotland with a passion but he never once allowed it to show.

He always reckoned that a day out of Hawick was a day wasted. In the years before his death this morning he didn't waste many days. He was never happier than sitting in the conservatory of the lovely house he owned overlooking the Teviot valley or on the touchline at one of the town's rugby grounds where you were as likely to find him watching Hawick Wanderers as Hawick RFC.

When I started working for my local newspaper in Jedburgh we'd often share a freezing cramped press box at Poynder Park, Riverside or Mansfield, and he was unfailingly kind, offering advice, sharing insight and information and handing out Hawick Balls, the minty sweets from his home town which he was never without. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone and he could charm a quote from the most abrasive prop forward or the shyest scrum half.

He's probably unique in that he became a Scottish rugby icon without actually playing for his country and it was a lifelong regret that his opportunity to wear the dark blue of Scotland was curtailed by the bout of tuberculosis that nearly killed him in 1947.

But Scottish rugby's loss was the rugby world's game because he took the same enthusiasm and knowledge of the game he showed as a player to become the best known voice on television for something like four decades, the true Voice of Rugby. His style was unique, the sonorous tones of his Borders roots allied to a talent for vivid, dramatic description and a turn of phrase that made him a legend.

Scrum halves were one of his favourite targets. Roy Laidlaw was forever lamenting the fact that while his half back partner John Rutherford was hailed as a gazelle he was always a Border terrier or a Jack Russell.

Who can ever forget descriptions such as:

He's like a demented ferret up a wee drainpipe

He kicked that ball like three pounds of haggis

They'll be dancing in the streets of (Merthyr/Kelso/Harrogate) tonight

He plays like a raging bull with a bad head

And of course, the one that became his catchphrase:

It's high enough, it's straight enough and it's long enough!

When he retired from the BBC in 2002 it was the end of an era. Many have tried but nobody has ever quite managed to fill his place at the microphone, how could they?

Bill the commentator was never less than brilliant, and his contribution has been recognised by the award of the MBE, CBE and OBE, but it is Bill McLaren, the true gentleman who never failed to share his sweeties, that I'll always remember.

My Hero is back

2010-01-16T06:07:00.000-08:00

A large parcel arrived through the door yesterday from Transworld. It's the copy edit manuscript or Hero of Rome, my next novel, and is the first opportunity you get to see the book as it will more or less be in its published form.

This part of the process is always exciting, and a little bit daunting, because it's probably the most important stage after the editor casts his verdict on your first draft and it's the bit where someone clever points out all the embarrassing mistakes that would have made you look like an idiot if they'd made it into print. I've never met my copy editor, but from the moment I saw what she'd spotted in my first book, Caligula, I knew I was lucky to be working with her. She types out her comments on an old fashioned typewriter, acid little asides that make you feel as if you're back in Primary 1, but which hit the mark every time.

With Hero of Rome most of the 23 notes are about my cavalier use of Latin plurals and the difference between a ballista and an onager, two types of Roman catapult artillery the legions use to batter the Brits into submission. I've been very fortunate that none of the three books has needed really major work at this stage, just a few minor tickles and a bit of polishing. What makes it fun is the attention to detail. Last time round with Claudius, I had a passage comparing a Roman legion to the constituent parts of an insect: a big orange centipede. I thought it was quite clever until the copy editor pointed out that a centipede isn't an insect at all, but a member of the genus arth.

A case of me not knowing my arth from my elbow...

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T04:10:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a year! If you'd told me last Christmas that I'd be where I am now I probably wouldn't have believed you. Another book published, another deal signed and the first of a new trilogy delivered. 2009 opened the door to a whole new life as a full time writer.
When I left the Scotsman in July, I looked forward to the future with a mixture of excitement and something not far short of terror. I was walking out of a career comfort zone and into the unknown, away from a salary to a place where the cheques arrive every six months, if they arrive at all. A lot of people said they envied me and that I was being brave. What they actually meant was they thought I was off my head.
But I had a plan, and as 2009 closes that plan is still on track.
There's still another six months before my new book Hero of Rome comes out, but the thought of it being on the shelves already gives me a thrill. It tells the story of Gaius Valerius Verrens, tribune of the Twentieth legion and reluctant commander of the last stand of the defenders of the Temple of Claudius against Boudicca's avenging hordes. It's a tale of danger and sacrifice, courage and comradeship, love and betrayal on an epic scale and I loved writing it. My last book, Claudius, had loads of great reviews although it didn't quite make the impact I hoped it would, but the wonderful thing is that the sense of expectation is always there. Maybe this is the one!

2010 will undoubtedly be a year of challenges for everyone - I hope it brings you joy and success, health and happiness.

Have a Merry Christmas and a great New Year

Doug

Final chapter

2009-12-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

I was in Glasgow the other day for lunch with a former workmate (Yes, you may well say the joys of self-almost-employment) when I had the misfortune to witness the death knell of the huge Border's Book Shop in Buchanan Street. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people scavenging for novels and non-fiction at knockdown prices and queues snaking from the tills back down into the basement. If you didn't know what was happening you'd have thought the book trade had never been in better shape.

To be honest the Glasgow shop has always been well-populated when I've been there in the past and I know the company's terminal problems stem from the problems in America, but seeing such a huge literary institution brought to its knees like that sent a shiver through me.

And the credit crunch strikes ever closer to home. The wine shop at the end of the road which has served me well for the past twenty years is closing on Wednesday. It's been Haddow's, Bottoms Up, Victoria Wine (twice) and Wine Rack but it's always been there. Now the shelves are empty. The reason they went bust is that the banks wouldn't extend their credit, still it's nice to know that bankers are putting the billions we gave them to proper use and awarding themselves enormous bonuses for surviving the financial meltdown they created in the first place.

Small world

2009-11-29T05:06:00.000-08:00

The publication of Caligula now seems a long time ago but I had more evidence this week that the team at Transworld are still beavering away on my behalf. Foreign language publishing deals for the book hit double figures with the addition of Bulgaria to the list of Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Serbia, Italy and Romania. None of them will make me rich, but there's a lovely feeling when you see how someone in another country has treated your stuff. I've got four so far and it's a toss up between Portugal (medieval-ish, arty, black and white) or Spain (almost sepia, wistful Rufus with lion on a chain) for my favourite. Looking forward to the Russian version. There's something about having your name in cyrillic ...

I did a piece about writing and how I got my break for a new online magazine WordsWithJam which is published for the first time this weekend. They gave me a great show, front page and all, and it's well worth taking a look at if you're into books and book people. Really professionally put together and lots of interesting writing. You can subscribe for free at www.wordswithjam.co.uk

Write off

2009-11-23T05:45:00.000-08:00

I can always write. Sometimes I write rubbish and sometimes I don't write a lot, but I always manage to make a bit of progress. Last week was one of the slow times. My excuse is the dreaded man-flu that glued up the brain and gave me a throat full of razor blades.

Still, I sat at the computer for a few hours every day and looked at the screen. If I'd been working on something fresh I'm sure I would have done more, but when you're trying to improve a story you've already written and have been wrestling with for a while its not quite so easy. Every time I looked at it I saw something different and every time my hand strayed towards the keyboard I felt like I was approaching an unexploded bomb. I changed bits, then changed them back again. Stared at the screen. Changed them back. Went for a cup of tea, pondered and then changed them back again. In the end I retreated into what I think of as an internet coma; wandering the world wide web in a haze of Google-induced self-hypnosis, teetering on the edge of the abyss that is Farmville or Mafia Wars.

Today, I'm back at work, full of enthusiasm, brain razor sharp, the words just fighting to trip off my fingers. So why am I sitting here writing my blog when I should be writing a book?

Answers on a postcard to ...

A Flying Start

2009-11-15T07:06:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from Scotland's newest book festival at Lennoxlove House, the home of the Duke of Hamilton near Haddington in East Lothian. Lennoxlove is the brainchild of Alistair Moffat and the team behind the successful Borders Book Festival and it got off to a brilliant start with sell-out crowds in the main marquee for writers as diverse as Rory Bremner, Martine McCutcheon, naturalist Simon King, Michael Morpurgo, Alexander McCall Smith and Kate Adie.
The house dates back to the 14th century and provides a magnificent backdrop for the festival throughout the day and night. Every room is packed with beautiful artworks and artefacts from the family's long, colourful and sometimes bloody history.
I was fortunate enough to catch Simon King's event and the affable Autumnwatch presenter provided a fascinating hour of anecdotes about his travels as a wildlife cameraman across the globe and encounters with the animals he so clearly loves, from otters to orcas. The story about his most dangerous filming experience - in Bristol City Centre - was hilarious.
The festival was held over two days but I don't think there's any doubt it will be back bigger and even better next year and I predict it will become one of the must-attend events on Scotland's literary calendar.

Sold out

2009-11-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

The hardback of Claudius has sold out on Amazon and on the Borders website and apparently the publishers have no more supplies. I had an inkling of this over the past couple of months when the Waterstone's shop in Stirling had been waiting for six weeks for their order, and there were none at Wigtown when I was there.

So, good news and bad news, and one of those things you don't consider before you've been published. The good news is that Transworld will be happy the print run has been sold. But it leaves them with a dilemma: whether to print another 1000 and risk being left with 500 unsold, or accept that you're on budget and on target and leave it at that. I suspect in these straitened financial times it'll be the second option. There is a third option which they're talking about, which is putting the trade paperback (airport edition) into mainstream shops. Which brings me to the bad news. If that doesn't happen it means Claudius won't be available in a lot of places for another eight months and I won't sell any books. The paperback doesn't come out until July, along with my next book Hero of Rome. It seems a big gap, but again I suppose it's all part of the learning process.

I've completed the second re-write - or is it the third - of Hero of Rome, really just a few very reasonable cuts, and a couple of minor tickles. I hate to tempt fate, but I think it's the best thing I've done yet. An epic of triumph and disaster, courage, love and betrayal set against the background of one of the bloodiest contests of the Boudicann rebellion.

A new chapter

2009-10-23T05:43:00.000-07:00

You have been found guilty of neglecting your blog!

I can't believe I haven't written anything here for a month, it's ridiculous. Anyway here's an update of what's been happening in the life of Doug Jackson, writer.

On October 3 I appeared at the Wigtown book festival with the brilliant Allan Massie (who's also the author of a book called Caligula, as well as many others), Charlotte Higgins (It's all Greek to Me) and Philip Parker, who circumnavigated the borders of the Roman Empire for his epic The Empire Stops Here. We were to discuss Why the Classics still matter. We all met very fortuitously in the Writers' Retreat about an hour before we were due to go on and discovered we had no real idea what was about to happen, or what kind of audience we would attract - it could be five or fifty. It actually turned out to be upwards of a hundred and fifty and they were still bringing in more chairs up to the kick off! I'd probably been more worried about this appearance than anything I've done so far. I enjoy history in general and the Romans in particular, but I'm no classicist. I needn't have worried, we all had a more or less equal contribution to make and the audience thoroughly enjoyed themselves. One thing it brought home to me, though, is the difference between 'knowing' and 'understanding'. I know a lot about my area of expertise, but the depth of understanding of the impact of the Classics on history and the present day my co-panellists showed was phenomenal.

The following week, I headed off to Italy for a research trip. The town of Herculaneum will have a big role to play in a forthcoming book and I wanted to get an idea of the geography of the place as well as taking a wider look at the other historical sites around the Bay of Naples. I'd been to Pompeii and we visited it again, but I enjoyed Herculaneum, which is still 75 per cent buried under a rather grubby suburb of Naples, more. We hired our own guide, Carlo, who gave us more insight than any book could and had a wonderful time walking the ancient streets and marvelling at the incredible state of preservation. On the way back to our hotel in Sorrento (The Bristol, great place, great service and some of the best views in the world) we stopped off at Torre Anunziata (another grubby Naples suburb) and the wonderful Vill Oplontis, which, though on a much smaller scale, even outdid Herculaneum. The incredible frescoes, battered but still where they were two thousand years ago, are stunning and give a real insight into the lost grandeur of this wonderful place. We also stumbled, almost by mistake, on the Greek temples at Paestum, south of Salerno, which must be Europe's best kept historical hidden secret. The three enormous temples dominate a site that rivals Pompeii for scale, if nor preservation, and are quite astonishing.

This week I've been completing the rewrite of Hero of Rome. I'd been a little nervous about it, but Simon, my editor was very complimentary. When I sent it off this morning, I had that little tingle of excitement you always get at times like these. Could this be the one?

Life in the slow lane

2009-09-22T00:54:00.000-07:00

Ah, the trials of working from home. For the past week or so since I sent the first draft to Simon I've been doing bits and pieces, preparing for events looking at new ideas and that sort of thing - but I haven't been writing, not real hard-graft thousands of words a day writing. The problem is that if I'm not writing I don't feel as if I'm working, which I know is daft.

This week I'm preparing a plot line for the next book and doing some reading and I promise to try not to feel guilty about it.

I also have a great new 'aviator' chair, so hopefully no more sore backs!

But its not all highs: Amazon has come back to haunt me. A couple of weeks ago Claudius was up in the top two or three thousand books and in the top 100 historical novels, in the past few days it has fluctuated between 10,000th and 60,000th for no apparent reason. On the other hand Caligula is selling pretty well. Time to give up watching the numbers again.

Booktalk

2009-09-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've had a really good week. Last night I gave a talk on writing and books up at Dunblane Public Library, about four miles from here, for Off the Page, the Stirling Book Festival. I'd been mildly stressed out about it for a couple of days beforehand because I knew I couldn't read a script for an hour and a bit. You always know there's a possibility you might freeze, but I decided to go with a few prompts and just wing it and it worked really well.

We had an audience of about twenty five or thirty and I'm pleased to say they loved it. It seems most writers just plug their books and read from them and it was refreshing to hear someone talk about the nuts and bolts of writing and being published. It was also another indication that the books have a growing fan base because quite a few of the people there had read either of both and were very complimentary about them. Altogether a very successful evening.

A week ago I was in Milngavie talking to a group there and again I got a wonderful reception from people who were obviously interested in the subject and who asked some incredibly perceptive questions, which I love, even when they're challenging.

Hero of Rome went off to Simon on Monday and I'll hear quite soon what he thinks of it. I've a feeling it will need a fair bit of work this time, but I'm up for it. I have a growing sense of obligation to the people who read my books coupled with a real determination to improve as a writer. When you first start writing you more or less only have to please yourself but when people start paying for your work it raises the stakes, you have to be a real professional.

Speaking of which, life away from the hamster wheel of daily journalism is fantastic. I've been putting in the hours at the computer and preparing for my appearances, but today the sun shone lunchtime and I downed tools and set off for walk up to a loch in the Ochil Hills behind Bridge of Allan. It takes you up through some fantastic woods and the views when you reach there are glorious. Huge dragon flies in red, blue and black hovered over the water and the trout were feeding on them. A buzzard soared overhead and I spotted a large hawk that wasn't a kestrel. A few deer were feeding in a faraway field near the little Iron Age hillfort I've developed a fascination for. Sheer magic!

Another first

2009-09-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

Claudius has finally won its first foreign deal. Amber, the Warsaw publishing house which published Caligula before it was out in Britain has also brought Claudius, which presumably is a sign that Caligula has been a success in Poland. Let's hope its the first of many! I've also had word of another foreign deal for Caligula, from Hungary, which brings the number of languages to nine.

I had the chance to read Hero of Rome through from start to finish for the first time last week and I'll spend next week polishing it before I send it to Simon at Transworld. You're never certain when you're writing it, but I think the book has turned out really well. Strong characters, a beautiful love interest and a story worth telling. The central battle scene is on an epic scale, chock full of savagery, heroism and sacrifice and several thousand dead bodies, just the way I like them.

I should also take this chance to say thanks to Samantha, my publicist, who has done a fantastic job over the last year. She's off to work for another publisher and I wish her all the best for the future

Went for a run this afternoon in the rain, across the river and out onto the Carse of Lecropt. There's a mill lade on the way and I spotted a kingfisher flying along it. They really are the most beautiful birds and if I could find a way to properly describe that glorious flash of azure blue on its back I'd be a writer.

I'm off to Milngavie on Monday, the event starts at 2.30 if you can get along.

Claudius

I've just finished listening to myself on Alex Dickson's Bookshelf on Smooth Radio. It's a strange experience when the voice coming out of the box is yours, but you barely recognise it. I got off to the usual slightly squeaky, nervous start but settled into it pretty well. I still hum and haw a bit too much and there were times when I was considering my next answer for so long I thought I'd gone off to the pub, but overall Alex teased a lot of interesting stuff out of me about Rome and the Romans and about writing. He has a chatty style and you can't help opening up to him which is the sign of a true professional.

Completed the story arc of Book 2 and sent it off to Stan on Friday. It's a more complex book than the first one and goes over some tricky ground, but it adds a new dimension to my character and has a truly epic ending. One slight problem is that it's made me think very seriously about where I go with Book 3. I've decided that my original idea - though it's geographically and culturally a thousand miles away - is probably a bit too close in subject. So I'll be doing a bit of heavy thinking this week.

I had a nice surprise the other day when I checked out the Jenny Brown website and discovered that Caligula is going to be published in Turkey, bringing the number of languages to eight, which is pretty good going I think. Claudius is out there somewhere being published as an uncorrected book proof and I can't wait to see it. Not sure if the jacket for the hardback arrived first the last time round, but it'll be great to see either of them.