Historical near misses, written for Orbit website

Sep 1 14 under Age of Iron, Orbit | Leave a comment

Why the world should be a very different place.

We should all be speaking Latin.

Julius Caesar’s first British invasion force in 54BC was the same size as William the Conqueror’s in 1066 – around 10,000 men. It stayed in Britain for few weeks. The second one in 55BC was two and a half times the size, but it returned to France after a few months. No Roman legionary set foot in Britain after that for a hundred years.

The accepted historical take of Caesar’s invasions is that the Romans won every battle and returned across the Channel victorious, twice. This version comes entirely from Caesar’s own diary and is clearly bollocks. He didn’t come to Britain with 25,000 soldiers for a summer holiday and he didn’t leave because he was winning too much. He intended to conquer. He should have been able to. His army was awesome and had overthrown all of France in two years . Something big happened to stop him. Read More

Piece on gore in books (particularly Age of Iron) written as guest blog for Karen Miller

Sep 1 14 under Age of Iron | 2 Comments

Gore in books

I’m going through the copy edit of Clash of Iron – Age of Iron book two – at the moment. The copy edit is the second last edit before publication, when an expert reads your book and says ‘this bit doesn’t work, that word’s wrong’ and so on, then you get to go through what they’ve said and lament how they just don’t understand you and change it all back…. Not really, my current copy editor, a man named Richard Collins, is excellent (the final edit is the proof edit – basically a spell check).

Anyway, reading this copy edit almost a year after I finished writing the book, I’m surprised to be surprised by the gore. It’s not wall to wall by any means – most of the book is humour-stuffed and more about the relationships between the main characters – but the battles are pretty visceral and there are some shocking episodes Read More