The first year

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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.