Tag: writing

Pop memories

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So, I haven’t been on here for a while. The realisation that the latest book required a fourth edit has taken all my attention. After reading some guy’s blog about how he continues to edit his uploaded books, even changing subplots, I decided to try his advice concerning reading the text out loud. I was, sadly, amazed how many errors remained after my third edit, on average about three per chapter. With one or two other changes as well, it took a while but I finally got to the end and have corrected the text. No doubt some remain somewhere but I think it’s as good as it’s going to get.

Last night then, tired of watching a very average Italian TV detective series, not helped by Channel 4’s endless adverts at regular intervals, we switched to YouTube and wallowed in early 1980s pop videos. About the time I finished at university and went out into the work world, initially in teaching, these brought back great memories as well reminding us how brilliant some of the music and musicians were. Many have survived, either in their groups or as individual artists, and some haven’t. Such is life. It must be hard to have such success in your teens or early twenties and then have to try and maintain the songs as you get older and musical tastes change.

I can’t remember all we watched but here are a few to cherish.

Great song. Not your typical ‘popstar’ but he had a series of hits that are memorable.
Ah, such a sweet chorus. Don’t recall others of theirs but this brings back memories of a sweetheart.
A wonderfully sinister group who produced and continued to produce great songs. Their cover of ‘Walk On By’ has to be the finest done, both for sadness and threat. This one shows off their musicianship – I’m sure if they had come along in the early ’70s they would have developed into a prog rock band!
Talking of scary…a fantastic TOTP appearance from the band who churned out song after song of quality. Too good for the TV show. Such a shame Weller pulled the plug on them.
One of the finest songs you will ever hear. No repetition, and the title line appears right at the end. A poem. Brilliantly simple rhymes, and some clever ones too. Still going strong as individuals and together as far as I know.
Last one…the song that got me through my teaching practice at a multi-cultural secondary school in Putney, London. Great kids but pretty hard going at times for a naïve young man fresh out of university. I survived – just! This song came out at the time and I clearly remember hearing it on a bus as I went down to the M&S store to get a new tie. Strange the things you recall some forty years later!

Finishing line in sight – don’t dare move it!

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As long as I do not start to read the pages again, and spot an infernal error, I have finished editing my attempt at an historical novel (although it might be said my tales of a PI in 1950s New York qualifies as ‘historical fiction’). Three times is enough. Anyone who finds mistakes can give themselves a prize. This edit certainly denied the odd adage of losing around 20% of the original text; this time I gained an extra 5000 words. But understandably, since the first third was written while I edited the last book so research was limited, and being set in the 16th century there was quite a lot of historical references I had forgotten or simply got wrong. It was an enjoyable story to create and never lost my interest, in fact the danger was in continuing the tale too far as it would be an easy thing to do with two storylines and the background of theatre life, plays and writers providing endless lines to follow.

Members of the Stratford Festival company in Shakespeare in Love

One weakness I succumbed to along the way was to use more and more 16th century terms. Initially I was determined to stick with ‘Yeas’ and ‘Nays’ and ‘Forsooths’, a little taste of the times but not sounding like a poor man’s Shakespeare. But as I checked various items such as clothing, hats, food, I came across lists of words used in everyday speech (often produced by teachers in preparation for a class visit to a Tudor house) and it was too much of a temptation not to add a few ‘haths’, ‘doths’, and ‘trows’ (I trow = I believe). It’s not a mire of impossible sentences but I expect there is some inconsistency. I will know better next time and start with a list of terms to use and ignore any others I discover. Having looked at many authors of that period there is great variation in what language to use, some enjoying the avoidance of all contractions and all the ‘-th’ endings, others reading like a modern thriller with a brief narrative of the political situation to remind the reader it’s supposed to be set in the reign of Henry VIII or whoever.

Photo by Tolga Ulkan on Unsplash

Addendum…by the time I posted this I had uploaded the text to Amazon and e-book and paperback should now be live. This is the first time I have actually felt exhausted at the end of a novel. Maybe it’s the greater length and therefore the longer editing time, or maybe it’s the historical element, so many little things to check. Hopefully there are not too many words used which did not enter the English language until later than 1590 – I’m told early on in Wolf Hall there is a word which only came into being in the 19th century; nice to think I may share something with Hilary Mantel.

Ramblings of a tired editor

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Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy editing my books, it’s always a great surprise to read something I wrote a couple of months earlier and find it not only makes sense but that one or two sentences actually make me sit up and think ‘Gee, did I write that?!’. But after the second or third edit you start to wish you could rush ahead, search for the cover image, start the Amazon malarky which always seems to have changed since the last book you uploaded and then get to that wonderful pricing page and press ‘Publish’. At that moment I forget about that book and my attention goes 100% to the next which I have already started writing in the coffee house each morning. Of course, the sudden sale of a hundred or so copies on Amazon might bring my attention back to that just finished novel but I wait to see that happen.

In the meantime I entertain myself as best I can while editing. I mentioned previously the podcasts of History Hit, a streaming service. They continue to be of great interest and very informative, not just about the Tudor and Elizabethan period my book is set in, but also on Medieval, Ancient and American history. Sometimes the title of a new podcast can have me exclaiming ‘Oh, no!’ and thinking I will have to go back through earlier broadcasts to find one more interesting. Only to be proved very wrong, of course. When I read the words ‘Transgender fairies…’ at the beginning of a title you might imagine my facial contortions and exclamations. Being a man of many years who recalls cowboy serials, Batman thumping The Joker, Top Cat’s laconic asides, and the original Star Trek, you might excuse my initial lack of political correctness. Well, I listened to ‘Transgender Fairies of Early Modern Literature‘ and…it was darn interesting! Puck, Ariel, etc and learning how fairies changed in their appearance and roles from medieval times into Elizabethan, due largely to the rise of the theatre and the need to ‘show’ fairies through boy actors, and I had my eyes opened to aspects of Shakespeare, in particular, which I had never been aware of before. Yes, (or should that be ‘Yea’, steeped as I am in Elizabethan times), the highly qualified expert seemed incapable of saying a sentence without using the word ‘gender’ but she was extremely knowledgeable and a very fluent speaker. Another podcast on the theme of Shakespeare’s Henry V also opened my eyes to many other themes within that play which I, and I suspect many others, always saw as a pro-war piece of work which could be used by anti-war factions too. If Shakespeare meant all these aspects of his plays, then, boy, what a heck of a writer he was.

Margaret Leighton as Ariel, The Tempest SMT 1952
Photo by Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on flickr

To massage my aching brain after all these intellectual discussions I turned to iTunes. Loaded on my PC, I go for months not using it then have a spending spree usually after something in my writing sends me googling a specific genre of music. Hence my obsession some months ago with smooth jazz for my last book. This time I suddenly realised I was missing a lot of my older downloads in my iTunes ‘library’. Annoyed I had been somehow diddled out of my purchases because I had changed my computer, I did eventually explore all the menus within my iTunes and discovered that the songs were all there but were held on a different page and needed to be downloaded again, without cost, to my present library of purchases. So I spent a pleasant morning rediscovering songs I had bought over the last ten years and selecting just some to download again (a very quick operation I must say).

Among the menagerie of tunes was this one, from a phase of discovering dance songs from the clubs, courtesy of a young woman I corresponded with in the late 2000s when I was working partly online for a franchise website. Most of the songs no longer hold my interest but this one does, the relentless beat of the Freemasons and the ethereal voice of the daughter of Judie Tzuke, a singer I recalled from my younger days, one Bailey Tzuke.

And isn’t it strange how our brains work? I spent an afternoon editing one chapter which starts with the main character’s female sidekick donning breeches and doublet despite having another character say earlier that she must never be seen in such an outfit outside of the theatre (long story…). Later in the same chapter she is mistaken for being the narrator’s ‘escort’, despite still disguised as a young man, and goes into a tavern with no query of her odd appearance. I seemed to have completely forgotten what she was wearing and completely missed it all again during the edit! Then, about five hours later as I sat watching TV, it suddenly came into my head what I had done. Quite crazy. So, upstairs I shot, scribbled down the error needing to be fixed, and corrected it the next day. It makes me wonder what other gaffes I have overlooked…

Worth a read!

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When I am writing a book, or trying to, the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down and reading someone else’s book. My eyes just can’t take any more print. In the evenings I tend to disappear into the TV and a series which captures my imagination and is filmed and directed in the style I like. So if a book makes me want to pick it up and read, despite the fact I have spent much of the day writing and staring at words on screen, it must be good. And, boy, this one is. The Revolt by Clara Dupont-Monod. As the author’s name suggests, she is French and this is the first of her books which has been translated into English, in 2020. It is about Eleanor of Aquitaine. A biography imagined to have been written by one of her sons, Richard. Known to the English as Richard The Lionheart.

The sentences tend to be short, giving the book great pace, and with the strong emotion of Richard for his mother, it really pulls you in and you could easily devour the book in one sitting (188 pages in this edition). It is one of those books you cannot wait to go back to and yet you do not want to finish it! Most of the tale is told then by Richard, although toward the end a few of the other characters get a chance to add their views briefly.

Eleanor was a tour de force. Married to the King of France, one day she saw Henry Plantagenet who was to become King Henry II of England and decided there and then he was the man for her. Almost unknown at that time she instigated the annulment of her marriage to Louis and within two years was married to Henry. Unfortunately she misjudged Henry’s intent and found he had no plan to allow her to continue as the ruler of Aquitaine. Most of the book is taken up with her struggle to turn her sons against Henry and to eventually defeat him. There is no real happy ending however.

If you have any vague interest in History, try the book. The flyleaf states that Clara has been haunted by Eleanor’s story for many years. Let us hope she now feels more content after writing this excellent book about her.

Tudor Podcasts!

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Just a quick post a) to show I am still around and b) to give a shout out for the podcast Not Just The Tudors which is part of the History Hits service. And is FREE!

I haven’t been a great fan of podcasts until now as I prefer to watch a screen or read print, but the accidental discovery of this podcast has changed my mind (along with the fact I seem to have drained Netflix of all its interesting programmes). While researching information for my current writing, a tale set in Elizabethan England, I came across this podcast. The programmes last from around 35 minutes to 55 minutes and extend, as the title suggests, beyond the limits of the Tudor monarchs and beyond the shores of England. They are presented by historian Suzannah Lipscomb, whom some of you may have seen on TV programmes, as she interviews other historians about particular topics. Often the other writer has just published a book or one is coming out in paperback for the first time. I have found them extremely informative and entertaining and a relaxing alternative to the TV and book, both of which struggle to maintain my attention these days unless they are of the quality I demand.

Broadcasts I have enjoyed so far have covered the topics of John Donne, 17th century Revolutionary England, Lady Jane Grey, Catherine Howard, and the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, and many more. I recommend them to you.

History Hits is a subscription service History channel, one beyond my pocket in these expensive times, but they seem to have other podcasts available for different periods of History – Gone Medieval and The Ancients being two I have noticed but not yet tried.

Give them a try – available on Apple, Spotify, Google and through Podfollow where I came across them. Happy listening!

Going Back

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It’s that old adage, isn’t it? Should you go back to somewhere you loved or have great memories from, the danger being it may not come up to your expectations or the people seem quite so wonderful. And going back to your old secondary school is a potential quagmire of possibilities. I have kept in contact with the place for many years and more recently in particular after the launch of their new website for Old Boys, and now Old Girls too, and have been able to send in various accounts of the old rules and regulations which might seem positively Victorian to the present-day pupils. I have also driven to and walked around the small town and the school buildings, which are scattered around the town, but I haven’t gone inside any since I left back in the 1970s. Hell, that date seems a long, long time ago!

The reason for the return was the unfortunate collapse of part of the ceiling of the old school building which had been the assembly hall in my day but now was a library. Fortunately no one was injured, but after the school governors allocated funds for the rebuild and repair there was scant money left for the refurbishment of the library and the books, both of which were apparently in need of an update anyway. Letters were sent out to the Old Boys and Girls to see if £50,000 could be raised. Along with many others, I sent in my donation, the figure was reached, and I expect exceeded, and an opening ceremony arranged. The renaming of the library after a former headmaster, who arrived during my time and oversaw many changes such as the introduction of girls into the school, was perhaps the driving force for me agreeing to attend. For some reason very few of my year group and others from around the early ’70s have kept in touch with the school – there is a long, philosophical, maybe political essay to be written on that, I believe – and I discovered I was the only Day pupil to contribute from my year and only two Boarders did so. Curiouser and curiouser. Anyway, I went, had a wonderful time, met guys I had played rugby and hockey against when the Old Boys brought teams to play us back in the day, discovered that the Deputy Head, or Vice-Master as he was called then (great title, no?!), is still with us and very chirpy, and the pupils we met still the intelligent, polite, inquisitive boys and girls we once were. Plus ca change, and all that.

The library, see above image, looks clean, new and comfortable. Remarkably the librarian is a woman who was a Sixth Former when I was there, one of the first girls to come to the school. She was obviously more than happy to ‘go back’! The town, like so many these days, is in the process of having ridiculously too many new houses built, just a few years after the other secondary school in the town was closed down – typical of this broken country. Still, my school has survived over 450 years so I guess it will shrug its bricks and go on as before. Mentioning the Vice-Master, I remember clearly him giving a lecture in our Sixth Form Friday afternoon General Studies course. The message was that we were the next generation of leaders for our country, whether it be in education, medicine, politics, business, or whatever, and that we must never forget what we have learned at the school about conducting ourselves and giving service and loyalty. I think I would like to apologise to everyone out there that clearly we have forgotten those things as the country we have helped shape is going nowhere fast! I knew I should have studied Economics for ‘A’ level, not Latin…

Maybe the key to ‘going back’ is to go when no one you shared the times with is there too. How many of those friendships survived the last day of term? How many friendly smiles hid a glare when your back was turned? How many classmates have gone through a life which has robbed them of all the dreams and hopes they had back in their schooldays – if they could ‘go back’ to then, they might, to avoid all the mistakes made later in life.

Maybe I should end with the first verse from Felix Dennis’ poem ‘Never Go Back’ (Dennis was a 1960s rebel, poet, bon vivant):
‘Never go back. Never go back.
Never return to the haunts of your youth.
Keep to the track, to the beaten track,
Memory holds all you need of the truth.‘

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my return. Maybe I’ll wait a fair while before repeating the exercise however.

Spring is springing!

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Well, the clocks are going forward or will have gone forward by the time I finish writing this post so Spring is more or less upon us. And it was my rediscovery of this wonderful song by Viktoria Tolstoy, unbelievably the great-great-granddaughter of writer Leo, rather than the clocks going forward here in the UK which made me realise where we were in the year. Our weather has been up and down, cold and warm, dry and wet, no sense of a season. And to say ‘rediscovery’ is a little fraudulent as I only first discovered Ms Tolstoy a few months ago when I had my Eureka moment with smooth jazz referred to in other posts. She might not rival Stacey Kent in my affections but on this particular track she hits everything right, a stunning performance. And talking of Stacey, I saw the other day she is appearing at Ronnie Scott’s in London in April. Sadly I discovered this too late, every show is booked out. Ah, next time, next time.

A much earlier reference to Spring came to me many years ago when studying Shakespeare. His Sonnet 98. The absence of his love makes all the signs of Spring still seem like Winter:
‘From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.’

Maybe we should go back further, to Aesop and ‘Winter and Spring’. Here Winter tries to lay claim to being of greater importance than mere Spring:
Winter made fun of Spring and mocked her for the fact that as soon as she appears, nobody can keep still;  some people go off to the meadows or into the woods, others like to gather flowers and lilies or perhaps to gaze upon a rose as they twirl it in the air or to twine it in their hair; while some board ships and even cross the sea to meet different kinds of people; no one worries any longer about the winds or the great downpours of rain from the sky. ‘Whereas I resemble a dictator or a despot,’ said Winter. ‘I command everyone to look not at the sky but down toward the ground; I frighten them and make them tremble and sometimes I make them content themselves while having to stay at home all day.’ Spring replied, ‘Indeed, that is exactly why mankind would be glad to get rid of you, whereas even the mere mention of my name is enough to bring them pleasure. By Zeus, there is no name more pleasant than mine! That is why they remember me when I am gone and give thanks when I appear again.’

And maybe to finish a spring forward to Rosamund Marriot Watson, writing under the name Graham R. Thomson, in the late 19th century:
‘THE YELLOW light of an opal
On the white-walled houses dies
The roadway beyond my garden
It glimmers with golden eyes.
Alone in the faint spring twilight,
The crepuscle vague and blue,
Every beat of my pulses
Is quickened by dreams of you.
You whom I know and know not
You come as you came before
Here, in the misty quiet,
I greet you again once more.
Welcome, O best belovèd—
Life of my life—for lo!
All that I ask you promise,
All that I seek you know.
The dim grass stirs with your footstep,
The blue dusk throbs with your smile;
I and the world of glory
Are one for a little while.
*****
The spring sun shows me your shadow,
The spring wind bears me your breath,
You are mine for a passing moment,
But I am yours to the death.‘

Whatever Spring brings you, may it be be full of hope and happiness.

Whoa, characters!

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I can remember quite clearly ploughing through pouring rain and a strong coastal wind one early morning to reach my favourite coffee house. Did I have an important meeting to make? Was I rendezvousing with a mistress? Was I stormed out of the house after a marital spit? No. I wanted to find out what my story character was going to do next. I had no ideas in my head, no plan. I had to sit down and wait for them to tell me what happened next.

Crazy. At least I thought so until I mentioned it to the guy who had run a Writing Group I went to a few years ago. He immediately said he was the same, he had no idea what was going to happen next in the story, had no plan laid out, and certainly not one of these chapter by chapter schemes that some writers swear by, even to the extent of knowing how many words they are going to end up writing.

It’s like that Alan Bennett quote – “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.” (from The Uncommon Reader) only substitute ‘character’ for ‘books’. You sit in front of your computer and wait for them to speak to you. ‘Okay, writer, you’ve left me facing the big, bad guy, I’m unarmed, a History teacher by occupation; how the hell do I get out of this one?’ And he/she does. Somehow. And why does he do this, that, the other, end up with the blond when you intended him to marry the brunette? Because he is he. Or she is she. They make their own decisions. (I should add here that if you are not a writer and reading this, you have probably left the room by now, or should. Characters are real. Forget the fiction crap, bookshops knop nothing.

And when you finish a book? And decide not to use the same characters again? What then? Are they left in literary limbo? Or do they go on, living out their lives? Has my New York PI solved countless cases I will never know about? Or was he gunned down in the very next episode?

And even famous writers get tired of their characters. Author Conan Doyle, creator of one of the world’s most famous detectives, eventually came to view his popular literary creation as a burden. In 1891, just five years after the publication of A Study in Scarlet, the first novel to feature Holmes and his sidekick Watson, Doyle wrote to his mother: “I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”  

Despite James Bond’s success, Ian Fleming was ambivalent about his famous character. He called Bond a “cardboard booby” and a “blunt instrument;” once, he said, “I can’t say I much like the chap.”

Tolstoy grew ashamed of having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This resulted from the “spiritual breakthrough,” when Tolstoy disowned all his earlier works for the sake of his new religious convictions.

So it seems our characters can become larger than life, or take on a life of their own. Or maybe we just bring to light a character who has always been there, just waiting to be written into a story and into our world.

It makes you wonder who is out there now, waiting to step onto the stage…? Oh, is that the time? I mkust hurry to the coffee house, someone is calling out to me…

You Festering Knave!

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For my sins (and I have many to confess to) I am continuing on with a story set in Elizabethan England, somewhere around 1570. As I write my first drafts sat in a coffee shop unconnected to the public WiFi I can only add small details of historical detail remembered from my school and university days (my age prohibits me using that awful ‘uni’ so prevalent these days; I blame Neighbours). The odd groat here, a jerkin there. At home I have started to research the basics – food, occupations, simple everyday language, social rules, etc. And I very soon had to confront the language issue. Do I try and write something completely in the style we believe from our limited resources? ‘Thys’ and ‘thees’ and convoluted sentence structures? Or do I let the characters sound like they just strolled off-set from Peaky Blinders? I decided to consult the oracle that is Hilary Mantel (she was the only historical writer I could think off in the moment). Much to my relief, I found she kept things simple: longer sentences, less abbreviations, less contractions, avoid the obvious modern words and phrases. That is good enough for me.

In my brief reading online about the period I was surprised to learn of laws passed around the 1570s to limit the clothing that each social class could wear. Imagine that today? Although, of course, today, money does set us apart in the quality of the clothes we wear, another form of ‘limitation’.

And even the wealthiest Elizabethans were only allowed to spend £100 per year on their outfits. Apparently it was discovered that many were splashing out ridiculous amounts to keep up with the fashion trends and in particular those started by Queen Elizabeth and it was threatening their families’ financial stability. When men start to wear corsets to give themselves a tiny waist and stuff their doublets to make themselves look ‘shapely’, I guess something needed to be done!

If I should finish the story, the book, should I list an impressive range of academic books and pamphlets, or be honest in this modern age and list instead an impressive range of Googled pages and Wikipedia articles? I do doubt that many writers actually read all the books they put in their back pages. Perhaps they have taken one sentence or learned one fact from the book and added it to pad out the list (creating the same falseness as the stuffed ‘peascod belly’).

And the Blackadder image? It’s hard these days to think of the Elizabethan times and not immediately conjure up Atkinson and co. Maybe it’s because of the ethos of the times, people looking forward to new horizons, quite literally in the sense of spreading England’s influence beyond the island, the ideas coming to light through playwrights and budding thinkers and ‘scientists’, at the same time held back by the limited resources and technology of the 16th century. Blackadder somehow always strikes me as a frustrated fellow who can’t wait for the mobile phone and internet to be created.

Plagiarise, You Fool!

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Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

Damn, that’s a difficult word to spell – plagiarise – I must have stared at it several minutes before I reckoned it was correct!

In an earlier post I described how I had been reading If We Were Villains by ML Rio, a book first published several years ago and enjoying a reissue, I guess, because there is talk of it possibly becoming a TV series or the like. Anyway, it was a great read, and has partly encouraged me to try and write a story set in Elizabethan times (read the other post to see why this might be). Having finished the book, I read through a few reviews on Waterstones’ website to see if other people enjoyed it as much as I had. Yes, they had, but one reviewer stated how the story bore many similarities to a book written by Donna Tartt – The Secret History – in the 1990s. I knew the author’s name but had never read any of her tales. Sought out, bought, I have now started it. And it is very good, very smoothly written, and maybe a little more ‘direct’ than Rio’s. The characters, for example, are described as seen by the narrator before you get to hear them talk or act. Rio’s seemed to slowly develop over the pages. Anyway, so far, the obvious similarity is the group of odd students studying a very niche subject (in Tartt’s case, Ancient Greek). If the plot follows similar lines to Rio’s I will be suspicious of the latter. But then, so many books have been written there has to ‘spillage’ doesn’t there? Overlaps, plain coincidences, repetitions of characters (how many different ones can there be?), etc.

And thirty years on, a chance for a whole new generation to be amazed by a well-written story and maybe encouraged to seek a ‘similar’ tale written years before. Is that so wrong? It does, of course, open up a very large can of worms. Think of all the books an unpublished writer can lift from? Endless. As long as it’s a good story, preferably a very good story, and the new writer can actually write semi-decent sentences.

Looking through the well known cases of plagiarism, I liked the one of Helene Hegemann, German, and only 17 when her novel took the German literary world by storm. Up for awards, on chat shows, critics bowed to her, what could go wrong? A blogger pointed out similarities with another book, then others picked up on examples from other writers, some claimed Helene’s father had written the whole thing. Helene didn’t deny it, she defended herself by saying  “There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity.” Her claim supported by the fact incidentally that one disputed passage came from an author who stole it from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch who admitted taking it from Jean-Luc Goddard! Helene’s publishers claimed it was not ‘plagiarism’ but ‘intertextuality’. But we all knew that, didn’t we?

In recent years in the UK many young women writers have appeared with stories that mix a historical setting (usually two-to-three hundred years ago) with an element of magic. More a case of ‘theme plagiarism’, maybe? Like all these new tales of characters from Ancient Greece and Rome which have suddenly populated our bookshelves.

I suspect you could all put forward your own suspicions and knowledge of famous cases.

But, hell, as the years slip away, it’s becoming a mighty big temptation. Now, I’ve got this idea about a guy in ancient times who survives a war but takes an absolute age to get home because someone or something keeps messing with his navigation. He needs an odd name… yeah, Odd…something…for sure…Oddy…