First of all, thank you, Nik, for hosting me today. We Mortons must stick together!
Alison in Rome - copyright Alison Morton, one-time use for this blog
My pleasure, Alison. There seem to be a lot of us about, too. Today's date is appropriate, as, on May 11, 330 Byzantium was renamed Nova Roma, though the name didn’t stick
and instead Constantinople became common usage. What inspired you to use that
form of New Rome for your series of thrillers?
Choosing ‘Roma Nova’ for my series was very pragmatic. It’s
the Latin for ‘New Rome’, but with the classical positioning of the adjective
after the noun. When the first settlers founded their new colony it had a much
longer name, as most Roman settlements did, Colonia
Apulinensis Roma Nova. Apulius was their leader and it was his late wife’s
father who gave them their first land. But that’s a mouthful so copying prevailing
practice they shortened it to ‘Roma Nova’.
I’ve
always been attracted to alternate history books and stories and you mention
some in your website about Roma Nova history. It can’t be an easy task, setting
up changes in history as we didn’t know it. How did you tackle that?
Well, you start by studying the social, economic and
political conditions at the time when the alternate timeline split from our
real one, technically called the ‘point of divergence’. This gives you a baseline. Rome changed quite
a bit during its 1229
year existence in the West. By 395 AD, when the first Roma Novans set out,
solidi had replaced sestertii and denarii, for instance. Regional government was localising with
‘barbarian’ warlords acting less like client kings of Rome and more like allied
or even autonomous leaders with fully delegated powers.
Projecting your alternate historical line forward from its divergence point needs to follow historical logic. You can’t cater for every eventuality over hundreds of years or you’d never write a word! Think about the basic values of your society and work through how, as a people, they would react to events or push them forward. All peoples/nations run through different cycles during their history; even Roma Nova suffered from downturns! And you need a great deal of thinking time to build your world; you can’t make things up ‘on the hoof’ and expect to keep it plausible. As J K Rowling has said, it has to be all worked out first in your head.
Who is your favourite character from one of your books and why?
Projecting your alternate historical line forward from its divergence point needs to follow historical logic. You can’t cater for every eventuality over hundreds of years or you’d never write a word! Think about the basic values of your society and work through how, as a people, they would react to events or push them forward. All peoples/nations run through different cycles during their history; even Roma Nova suffered from downturns! And you need a great deal of thinking time to build your world; you can’t make things up ‘on the hoof’ and expect to keep it plausible. As J K Rowling has said, it has to be all worked out first in your head.
Who is your favourite character from one of your books and why?
Of course, I love Carina, my
protagonist; I even interviewed
her. But equally intriguing are the
triangle of men around her: Conrad, her husband, undoubtedly the love of her
life; Lurio, the cop, also her colleague and ex-lover; and Apollodorus,
criminal and ex-associate who keeps his own counsel until one day in PERFIDITAS...
What are you working on now, besides SUCCESSIO?
What are you working on now, besides SUCCESSIO?
How much research goes into each book?
A lot! Reaching into the past means getting inside the heads of the
characters, imagining what they see in their everyday world, what they smell,
eat and touch. If you set your story in a different country, you can visit the
places the characters would live in, smell the sea, touch the plants, walk
under the hot blue sky, or freeze in a biting wind. But if you invent that
country, then you go about it differently.
You
need to think about your country’s approximate location and research real
countries nearby for scenery, weather, transport, farming plus industry,
political trends, architecture, even the type of cuisine. Roma Novans eat a
diet approximately Italian/central European, but with quite a lot of echoes
back to ancient times e.g. honey cake.
Luckily,
I’ve breathed in history since I was a kid, particularly the Roman type. I even
‘went back to school’ to take a history masters’ thirty years after my first
degree. So I have a reasonable grounding in the aspects of Roman history I want
to draw on to start the story.
I write the basics of a complex scene, then mark the text up in bright blue square brackets which gives me a visual signal to research more. For example, my 21st century Romans follow the traditional system of burning their dead. I knew how the pyres were built and that libations were thrown into the flames, so I could write the scene. But then I went back to the sources and refreshed my memory, I saw I’d totally forgotten that the family party has to walk three times round the pyre. Basically, you need to check everything and if there’s even a tiny worm of doubt, check again.
Many thanks, Alison. I might add that there is a great deal more interesting detail in your blog (see below). Now, please tell us about your books.
Well, Roma Nova started with INCEPTIO
(Kindle version on special officer this weekend until Monday 12 May!), then
continued in PERFIDITAS.
The third in series, SUCCESSIO will be out in early June.
Roma Nova – the last remnant of
the Roman Empire that has survived into the 21st century – is at peace. Carina
Mitela, the heir of a leading family, but choosing the life of an officer in
the Praetorian Guard Special Forces, is not so sure.
She senses danger crawling
towards her when she encounters a strangely self-possessed member of the unit
hosting their exchange exercise in Britain. When a blackmailing letter arrives
from a woman claiming to be her husband Conrad’s lost daughter and Conrad tries
to shut Carina out, she knows the threat is real.
Trying to resolve a young man’s
indiscretion twenty-five years before turns into a nightmare that not only
threatens to destroy all the Mitelae but also attacks the core of the imperial
family itself. With her enemy holding a gun to the head of the heir to the
imperial throne, Carina has to make the hardest decision of her life…
About
Alison
Alison Morton holds a bachelor’s degree in
French, German and Economics, a masters’ in history and lives in France with
her husband.
A ‘Roman nut’ since age 11, she has visited sites
throughout Europe including the alma
mater, Rome. But it was the mosaics at Ampurias (Spain) that started her
wondering what a modern Roman society would be like if run by women…
INCEPTIO, the first in the Roma Nova series, was
shortlisted for the 2013 International Rubery Book Award and awarded a B.R.A.G.
Medallion® in September 2013. The next in series, PERFIDITAS,
published October 2013, has also just been honoured with the B.R.A.G. Medallion®. Alison is working on the third book SUCCESSIO
which will be out in June 2014.
Alison's links
Find
where you can buy Roma Nova stories (multiple retailers)
Informative interview. Thank you, both.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David, for popping in and for leaving a comment.
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it, David.
ReplyDelete