Countdown to Claudius

It's been an interesting week for a lot of reasons. On Tuesday I was up at 4am and spent ten hours on trains to and from Yorkshire for work stuff. Getting up was a pain but I managed to make a lot of progress on my latest project because writing on the train is what I do best. Every cloud etc.
On Thursday I took part in an event in Glasgow at the Mitchell Library to promote greater links between libraries and publishers. All the big publishers were there and librarians from all over Scotland and there was much talk of book groups, readings and promotional events. I'm committed to doing something in Polmont prison which should be interesting, and Conton Vale (Scotland's women's prison) which will be more interesting still. Sam my publicist made a great presentation in which I was hailed as a brilliant new voice in British historical fiction. It was lovely but I'll believe it when I read my name in the Sunday Times bestseller list.
There were also quite a few fellow authors there. It was great to see my mate Bob Low of Oathsworn fame again. I had a good chat with Alan Clements, who somehow found time while helping to run STV to write a political thriller, Rogue Nation, which has really captured the imagination in Scotland. Carmen Reid, whose chick lit novels my girls adore, was also at the event and turned out, like most writers I've met, to be totally unassuming despite her success and had the library ladies eating out of her hand.
Stan was on the phone with some optimistic news about what happens after Claudius. I can't reveal anything at the moment, but things are definitely looking up!

Countdown to Claudius

Had a wonderful night in Jedburgh on Friday with my daughter Kara when I made the Toast to the Jethart Callants Festival in front of 150 dignitaries from all over the Scottish Borders. We received a fantastic welcome and were treated like royalty all night. The speech went down really well and many people were very complimentary about Caligula, which has made me a bit of a celebrity in the town. Later, I took Kara around my old haunts and she was astonished that I knew somebody in every pub we went into. Jedburgh is like that: a close-knit, down to earth, hard working community that has a long, colourful and sometimes painful history in the front line of Scotland's four hundred year border wars with England. Today it suffers like all the Border towns from lack of investment and a diminishing industrial base. The mills have almost all gone, the electronics industry in decline. Jed is fortunate to have American-owned LS Starrett, lured to the town 50 years ago by visionary townsfolk who travelled to the States to convince the firm's bosses to put their faith in the Borders work ethic. The trust forged on those visits has been repaid a hundred times over on both sides.
I based my speech on the three words that for me sum up the festival. History, community and respect. Jethart's Here is a war cry that has rung down through the centuries on a score of battlefields, where men from the town rallied and kept the enemy at bay with their deadly Jethart axes. The festival is at the core of the community, woven through it from top to bottom, as evidenced by the hundreds who gathered in the Square to witness the appointment of this year's Callant, Murray Yourston. And it is he and his predecessors who have stepped forward when the town needed them since the first festival in 1947 and committed themselves to represent their community for three years who deserve our respect, along with all the other committee members and unseen helpers who turn out to make the festival such a huge success every year.

Wednesday will be a big day, one way or the other. That's when the decision will be made about my next three books. As Stan says: fingers and everything else crossed.

Countdown to Claudius

I may have taken a significant step closer to a new book deal this week. The three ideas I put forward to Stan (the agent) were forwarded to Simon (the editor) at Transworld and he liked two of them a lot. The only thing wrong with the third was that it was too close to something Manda Scott is working on. Simon asked me to put together a single page synopsis for each of them and (fingers crossed) he'll be presenting them as his next project.
Nothing's certain in this world, but it feels like progress.
Great news midweek from Samantha my publicist, who is doing a brilliant job. I'm invited to appear at Wigtown Book Festival in September. We went last year with our friends, Elaine and John, and stayed in Newton Stewart, and had a fantastic time. I can't wait!
The Borders Book Festival first, though, where I'll be chatting on stage to my friend David, the books editor at the Scotsman. Hopefully, I'll have the book proof of Claudius by then and I'll be able to promote it.
Also had a parcel from Transworld, the complete and unabridged audio book of Caligula, 10 CDs read by the actor Russel Boulter. I've only listened to the prologue so far, and very chilling it is too. You don't really have much of an idea of the impact your words will have on other people when you're writing them, but I now know what people mean when they say Caligula is 'visceral'. You try to impart realism, but when the scenes are as brutal as some of them in Caligula, if you recreate reality too well it can be pretty overwhelming.
I travelled down to Jedburgh at the weekend for the rugby sevens and had a great time catching up with friends. On Friday I'll be giving the toast to the Jethart Callants Festival in the town hall in front of 150 dignitaries: of all the spin-offs I've had from being a published author, this is the one I'm proudest of.

Countdown to Claudius

Not much to report on the book front. Haven't heard back from Stan since I sent him the second and third story arcs. But if things follow the same pattern as last year I should get either the book proof or the jacket of Claudius in the next couple of weeks.

We had an great day out in Glasgow on Saturday, at Kelvingrove Museum, where my former Daily Record colleague Bob Low and the Glasgow Vikings were putting on a historical re-enactment of warring Scotland through the ages. I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was highl;y professional, pure entertainment with lots of dangerous looking swords and axes and in authentic costume ... oh yes, with a sense of humour.

Picts, Vikings, knights and clansmen came together at various times and knocked lumps out of each other. The re-enactors are a hugely enthusiastic bunch and none more so than Einar the Black, who is the inspiration for one of the characters in Bob's Oathsworn books. The fighting was brutal: swords snapped, spears bent and shields splintered, the only thing missing was gore, but I gathered from Bran, a young Pictish gentleman who was just making his comeback after a spear had accidentally almost taken his eye out, that's not always the case.

Bob himself made an appearance as Robert the Bruce, clad in chain mail from head to toe. He'd had it on for eight hours, looked as if he was cooking, and it was beginning to chafe, but he still managed to give a good account of himself, albeit fighting at a sedate pace in keeping with a man who's carrying several hundredweight of metal about his person. The experience will stand him in good stead for his next project, the Kingdom series, a warts and all trilogy chronicling the lives of Scottish heroes Wallace and Bruce.

Countdown to 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.

Countdown to Claudius

This has been a very productive week in just about every way. I've been working on a mammoth project at my day job that involves endless meetings, changing working patterns for the whole place and trying to get people behind it even though there lives are being changed. Interesting doesn't really describe it. But it seems to be coming together now and nobody's ambushed me on the way to the train or tried to run me over in the car park, which is a big plus.

I sent the final changes for Claudius off last weekend, but it wasn't accompanied by that little panic attack of 'what if I've left something in that will make me look like an idiot', because I was straight on to the next project. Simon has asked me to put together detailed story arcs for three entirely new books featuring an entirely new character. In a way it was a mirror of the moment when Sarah O'Keefe suggested I take the first 40,000 words of The Emperor's Elephant and turn it into a different book. At moments like these you can either collapse in a panic attack or you think 'Wow what a fantastic opportunity'. Fortunately, mine was the second reaction. It opened up a whole new vista and my mind immediately started churning with possible characters and situations.

I got down to work on Monday and by Thursday I had book one complete. It flowed so naturally it was as if I'd had it in my head all the time. There was also one of those signpost moments. I was sitting in my office working on a month's worth of rotas for thirty people covering 18 hours a day over seven days (and trying to keep them all happy), when David Robinson walked in and handed me a book. The one thing that had become clear right away when I started working on the arc of book one was that I didn't know enough nitty gritty detail about the life of the people I was going to write about. The book I had in my hand was a manual that let me into the secret of what they had for breakfast and what it felt like to wear their clothes!

Started book 2 on Thursday on the train. Got detail of chapter 1 down and didn't know where to go next. It was based on a vague idea and I realised I hadn't even written a synopsis, which was asking a bit much. Started on the synopsis at Linlithgow and I knew I had the book in the bag by the time I got to Edinburgh Waverley. I've got the bones of five chapters down now and I can feel it growing in my head all the time.

At the moment, book 3 isn't even an idea, just a name, but I have a great character, an exotic world he will live in and an epic finale that will ring down through the centuries.

Am I getting ahead of myself? Er, just a bit. I've been down this way before and the brilliant ideas can slip through your fingers like smoke when you sit down and try to make them happen. But I have a good feeling about this. It feels like one of those moments when you come to a fork in the road and some inner voice tells you which is the right one.

Countdown to Claudius

It's funny the old book business; for weeks on end nothing happens and you wonder if it's all gone away and then suddenly things start getting exciting again. Today I'm ready to hit the button on Claudius for the last time. The typeset manuscript has been read and read again, corrected and then recorrected, but I know that when it goes I'm going to be hit by that feeling of regret and the knowledge that there are things I could/should have done better. The upside is I've read it four times in the last two weeks and I think it's great. A different type of book from Caligula, but with real heart and a blockbuster centrepiece.

I've just come back from Glasgow where I was doing an interview with Alex Dickson on Smooth Radio. I'm familiar with Alex's work, he did a similar half hour show on Radio Clyde that I was able to listen to occassionally and I was always struck by his easy manner with the writers he was talking to. Today he excelled himself. It was like meeting and old friend and having a blether about things that interested us both. I'm also learning all the time. When I did my first interview with BBC Scotland, I took along information written down to refer to, but I realise now that, having lived with Caligula for about four years in one form or another, the information's all in my head and it's just a question of letting it come out. The only strangeness might have been in talking about something that is, for me, a whole book ago, but I found that I still retained my old enthusiasm for the whole Caligula experience.

With Claudius gone, my thoughts naturally will turn to book 3, and that's where the real excitement comes in. Changes are afoot, which I'll keep to myself, but they are really positive changes and a whole new interesting challenge that I can't wait to get started on.