On the march again

I've just this very minute sent the first draft of Sword of Rome, the fourth Gaius Valerius Verrens adventure, to my new editor Simon. It takes Valerius into the opening phase of The Year of the Four Emperors, a fascinating period of Roman history when the Empire is devastated by civil war and neutrality is not an option.

Aulus Vitellius would surprise everybody

When it opens, Nero is still on the throne, but every hand is raised again him. In the wings waits Servius Sulpicius Galba, governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, a man with the bloodlines and ambition to be Emperor, but none of qualities that would make him a good one. At Galba's side rides the equally ambitious Marcus Salvius Otho. Formerly Nero's favourite and a man who traded his wife for advancement, Otho is certain he'll be appointed the elderly Galba's heir, thus opening the path to the throne in a few years' time.

But the fat man who will surprise them all is also waiting for the call from Galba. When Aulus Vitellius reaches his province of Germania Inferior it will set off a chain reaction that threatens to consume a hundred thousand lives.

The characters are in place, the scene is set for a tragedy of epic proportions, and only one man can stop it happening.

Valerius conspires in the death of one Emperor, survives the fall of another, only to be sent on a virtual suicide mission by a third. On the way he'll be stalked by an implacable enemy, faces an impossible dilemma, and is forced to choose between love, honour and duty.

Now, I have an event with the master himself, Mr Bernard Cornwell, to prepare for in London at the weekend. After that it's back to The Excalibur Codex and Nazis, Islamic terrorists, rogue spies and a deranged US politician with a guilty secret.

Life's never dull!

In search of Rome's greatest general

When I began thinking about the subject of the third novel in the Gaius Valerius Verrens series, my first object was to get Valerius back into uniform. In Hero of Rome he had been the rather immature young Roman officer of a type that was certainly common throughout the Empire’s armies, but a man forced to grow up quickly in the balefire of Boudicca’s rebellion. It turned out that he excelled at warfare, and I knew I’d taken a risk in making Defender of Rome a much more nuanced, political novel of betrayal and intrigue.

Judaea which was just coming to boiling point in the mid to late 60s AD seemed to be the natural environment for the new novel, but during my researches for the earlier books I’d come across an intriguing figure, General Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo. At the time, Corbulo was Rome’s most successful general; better known than Suetonius Paulinus, conqueror of Boudicca, and even the future Emperor Vespasian. He was also hailed for his loyalty to his Emperor; even Tiridates, King of Armenia, whom Corbulo had twice defeated, told Nero that he had no more loyal commander.

So why did Nero order his most successful and loyal soldier to commit suicide, an order Corbulo complied with because the alternative was the disgrace and impoverishment of his family? That, I thought, was a question worth trying to answer. So in Avenger of Rome Valerius takes ship for the east, and Antioch, where Corbulo rules almost as an Emperor in his own right. Yet I very quickly discovered I had a problem. By the time Valerius reaches Antioch, Corbulo’s campaigns in Armenia and Parthia had been fought and won. Where was the great battle I knew had to be at the heart of this book?

After debating long and hard over the ethics of rewriting history, I decided the answer was to take the political situation in Rome and the east and create a crisis; a plausible crisis that the events of the time could very easily have created. This in turn would lead to a battle that I would have to create from scratch in my imagination. The first question was: where would it be fought? It could have been a huge dilemma, yet my first check of Google earth in the utterly remote region where the armies would meet presented it to me on a plate. The perfect place to fight a defensive battle against huge odds. A place I call the Cepha gap. It seemed impossible, but there it was, this narrow valley running through the mountains, the perfect highway for an invader and a dagger into the heart of Armenia. Valerius had his battle, and I had my book.

Lift off for Avenger of Rome

To Blackwells bookshop in  South Bridge, Edinburgh, for the launch party for my latest Gaius Valerius novel, Avenger of Rome.

After I'd thanked everyone who's supported me in true Oscar fashion, I gave a short talk about how and why I write, introduced the novel and gave a reading. Afterwards I took about three times as many questions as I was expecting, which is always a good sign, and then spent half an hour signing Avenger of Rome hardbacks and copies of The Isis Covenant, the new thriller by my alter ego Mr James Douglas.

Many thanks to Blackwells for organising another great event.

I do love a good book launch

Had a fantastic time last night at the launch of The Isis Covenant when about fifty people turned up at Waterstones in Stirling to help me celebrate the birth of my latest James Douglas book.

Lots of old friends turned up who'd been at all my launches and several new ones who were there for the first time.

We had a few drinks, I gave a short speech - with a special thanks to my wonderful editor Simon Thorogood who's moving on to greater things - and did a reading, signed until my wrist hurt and then it was back to Chez Jackson for a few hours of drinks, nibbles and good conversation. I say nibbles, but my good friend Mr D. Fisher took over the kitchen and produced an array of cordon bleu canapes that would have graced any table at Gleneagles or the Ritz.

Yet another book launched on a wave of goodwill that will hopefully send it into the stratosphere.

The author at rest

None of it would be possible without the support of the lovely Mrs J

My son Gregor and girlfriend Siobhan

The speech

I signed around 50 books

Another satisfied customer, my friend Allison

My daughter Nikki does love a good book launch

Fingers crossed!

The little acorns from which novels grow

Apologies yet again for my prolonged absence from the blog, but the reason will become clear. I've been working on the final chapters of Sword of Rome, proofreading Avenger of Rome and The Isis Covenant, and preparing for their launches on August 14th in Edinburgh and August 2nd in Stirling respectively.

I was keen to complete SoR before taking my summer break, but the epic battle turned out to be even more epic than I realised and I still have a couple of key scenes to write before I can lay it down for a while and let it percolate. Not that I'll be resting. With the tight deadlines I set myself it's important that I get the ball rolling pretty soon on The Excalibur Codex, which is the next Jamie Saintclair novel. At the moment I have a wham-bam start and a satisfying ending, but a relatively vague idea of what happens in between.

One of the questions a writer is most frequently asked is: Where do you get your inspiration?

With some people it takes hours and maybe weeks of deep thought to come up with an idea, but mine tend to appear in lightning flashes set off by fairly insignificant sparks.

Caligula and Claudius were spawned by a single line read by Timothy West on a CD of Simon Schama's History of Britain that went 'And the Emperor Claudius rode in triumph on an elephant and took the surrender of Britain'.

The six books that will eventually make up the Valerius series have their roots in one sentence from the Roman historian Tacitus that I read while I was researching Claudius.

The Doomsday Testament came to me as I read a journal my dad had written about his early life.

I'd planned at least four Jamie Saintclair books, but the other day I stumbled on what will be a fifth: The Ionian Odyssey. I was in the area looking for a way into a new Roman novel, but stumbled on something completely different. Walking up a rocky path on a tiny Greek island we'd only found by mistake, with cicadas rattling off my hat, tiny lizards scuttling underfoot and thorns ripping my legs, I breasted a rise to be confronted by row after row of marbles crosses. The island was a lazaretto and was once populated by lepers, so of course people died there, but this was different. There were no lepers in 1948 and 1949 when these people - almost all young men in their twenties - died, often on the same day. Gradually it dawned that something even more terrible had happened on this scrubby, sun-scorched knoll. And round another corner was the incontrovertible evidence. A stretch of crumbling wall with dozens of holes punched deep into the stone and mortar: an execution site. That's when it came to me. A country torn by civil war. A man awaits his fate and vows to take his secret to the grave. A treasure hidden through an earlier conflict that contains the roots of a new one ... 

A chilling sight and the germ of a new novel

Finding a state of grace

One of my all too infrequent blogs on the craft of writing. I don't really feel it's my place to lecture other writers on what's right and wrong about crafting a novel. If someone wants to write a book it's a given that they have a reasonable grasp of English and an imagination, and that's really all you need, apart from stamina. Still, this came to mind through the week and I thought it was worth sharing.

Many years ago a lovely little sprite of a man called Jock Hume tried to teach me the rudiments of the bagpipes. I'd go up to the wee room he used at the top of his tenement townhouse opposite the grammar school and spend fruitless hours working on the scales on the chanter (the bit of the pipes that has the holes in it). It wasn't long before we both knew that he was working with someone who had not the slightest semblance of musical ear, but Jock was a trier, so we persevered.

Sometimes he would try to enthuse me by talking about the great pipers who turned what is a relatively simple musical instrument into a thing of mystical power. One of the ways they did it was with grace notes.

A grace note (and my mate Jimi the Piper will wreak terrible vengeance on me if I've got this wrong) is the musical embellishment, the twirl or the skirl, that an experienced piper uses to enhance a tune. A great piper can transform a reel or a jig to something wonderful that is only vaguely recognisable as the original, with the help of self-made notes he's slipped into the music.

It was when I was writing the other day that I realised that grace notes are just as important to an author.

For a writer, a grace note is the little piece of poetry at the end of a chapter that draws you in to the next one; it is the beautiful sentence that makes the author proud and the reader gasp; the wonderful piece of description that makes a character become a real, living breathing human being.

The grace notes can be the difference between an ordinary book and a great book.

But the important thing about grace notes is that they are embellishments. A lot of wonderful books probably don't get written because the writers agonise over every word, every sentence and every paragraph in the search for perfection, and never finish the first draft. But for me the first draft is purely and simply the foundation of the book, and as long as the building blocks of plot, narrative and character are in there, all that matters is to push on so that the story becomes a book. The important thing is that those foundations are solid and complete.

A first draft can only be improved and it's how often you're prepared to improve it that makes the difference between the book it is and the book it has the potential to be. Every time I read a manuscript I see little gaps where a tiny grace note can make a huge difference. When the gaps are filled - and that can be after the sixth or seventh rewrite - it's time to move on.

So the message is get that book written. The genius can come later.

Making history

So it's off to the Borders Book Festival at the weekend and rubbing shoulders with the shortlisted authors for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Who says you need good weather to have good fun at an outdoor festival? It was chucking it down on Saturday, rattling the roof of the Festival Marquee like bursts of machine gun fire, but all it did was imbue the sell-out crowd with a hearty dose of Blitz mentality. Rain? It's the Scottish summer, what do you expect?

I love the Borders Book Festival with a passion, and not just because it's in Melrose, the region's historical heart and a place where I spent four idyllic years living on the shoulder of the Eildon Hills, which the Romans called Trimontium. I was a performer three years ago, just before I took up writing full time, and I've never felt so welcomed, and at the end of festival party on the Sunday night the spirit of optimism, togetherness and joy of books and writing lasted until dawn. The organisers have made it one of the must-visit events on the Scottish cultural calendar. It's smaller and more compact and user-friendly than the megalithic Edinburgh Book extravaganza and all the better for it.

The Walter Scott prize is now the fourth biggest book award in the UK, with £25,000 for the lucky winner and it's the brainchild of the Duke of Buccleuch, who has a plainly heartfelt affection for his famous ancestor. On Saturday, the shortlisted books were introduced by Festival director Alistair Moffat and the brilliant John Sessions read an extract, somehow managing to give each of them the unique voice its author intended. In the readings, the quality of the writing shone out, reaching into the hearts of the packed audience who listened in reverent silence. It was a fantastic performance by a wonderful actor. When the applause died down, Jim Naughtie, a book festival regular, announced the winner - Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side - and the prize was presented by the Duke.

Later, Barry and his fellow shortlisters Andrew Miller (Pure) and Allan Hollinghurst (The Strangers Child) - the others were The Sister Brothers, by Patrick De Witt, The Quality of Mercy by the late Barry Unsworth, and Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan - took the stage to talk about the craft of historical writing with Jonathan Tweedie, of Festival sponsors Brewin Dolphin. It was entertaining as well as fascinating, especially when the lugubrious Dubliner read from his prizewinning novel - 'I'm only going to give you one sentence. Unfortunately it's a sentence that runs for a page and a half' - a rumbustuous, rollicking monologue that alternately tugged the heartstrings and had the audience chortling with laughter. Fascinating, because no-one on stage seemed to have a concrete idea what actually constituted a historical novel and one of them seemed genuinely surprised that anybody thought he'd written one. And that's the only problem I have with the Walter Scott prize: the fact that the definition of historical fiction is so enormously broad. The single hard and fast rule is that the book must be set more than sixty years ago (the sub-title for Scott's Waverley is 'Tis sixty years hence'). It's meant that the majority of the books shortlisted so far have been works of literary fiction set just far enough in the past to meet the criteria. They've all been wonderful books, but I doubt if most of their authors would have described them as historical fiction before they made the shortlist. True, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall bridged the gap, but the only genuine cheerleader for what I'd call commercial historical fiction has been CJ Sansom's Heartstone and for me there might have been an element of tokenism in that, because I don't think it's his best work.

So lets see a Bernard Cornwell, a Con Iggulden, a Robyn Young or a Robert Low making the list - or even, dare I say, a Jackson. Of course, you could argue that the quality of writing in the shortlisted books is exceptional: this is a prize that celebrates literary excellence and the reason mainstream historical fiction doesn't make the list is that it's not well enough written. Come to think of it that's why I go along to the award in the first place. I defy any writer of historical fiction to sit in the audience and not wish he was up there on the stage, and I come away every year vowing that my next book will be better, and one day it'll be me.