History lover- What a ride (and NOT in a carpentum!)

Writer or not, anyone ever have that time or moment in history that you just can’t get out of your head? For me, that’s what the Roman Empire and Roman Britain have been for about 10 years now. When I first saw the 2011 film, The Eagle, (based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth) it was akin to love at first sight. The curiosity it sparked in me was unlike any movie or book ever had before. I wanted to keep reading about it to understand what I’d never known. And the more research I did, the more immersed in the world I became. The tiny spark blazed into an inferno, and before long, I’d written a series of 6 novels about the life of a Roman girl named Thalia, living in Roman Britannia. And of course, her story wouldn’t be complete without mentioning her forbidden love, a Briton slave named Aledus.

But then real life happened. I went from a year of part-time teaching to full-time. Writing fell to the wayside, and Thalia and Aledus fell back into the obscurity of history for 8 years.

That was until I decided I wasn’t going to let my dream go. I made the time to start researching and writing again, beginning Thalia’s story earlier than the original manuscripts and setting it in the Flavian dynasty. I had a story to tell, and I was determined to do it. And that leads me to where I am now.

Understanding the drama and politics that plagued the times felt like a full-time job, and I loved every moment of it! It seemed there couldn’t exist enough books for me to get my hands on to read anything and everything about Emperor Domitianus, or as we know him, Domitian. I wish I knew the classicist, Mary Beard, so that I might thank her personally for all the work she’s done to bring knowledge of Roman life to us nearly 2,000 years later. I really do wonder what it was to be alive at that time and witness what they did.

With that in mind, I probably spend an absurd amount of time wondering if the story I’m seeking to tell could’ve actually happened. I want to believe that there was at least one girl in late first century Rome who dreamt of marrying someone other than a man her father had chosen. And I want to believe that her story unfolds in a way that, even 1,946 years later, we can still relate to.

If you want to know what that story is, then I offer you my first book, The Dark before the Dawn.