Age of Iron
Page 45
I love video games, particularly the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. I’m also a keen photographer, serious enough that I have several lenses and process every shot with Photoshop. That processing now takes all the time that I used to spend playing video games. Photos are a more productive hobby, but I do miss the virtual world excitements of storming fortresses and finding slightly better swords than the one I’ve been wielding for the last ten hours of gameplay.
Do you sympathise at all with the bad guys you write?
Completely, since most of the good characters I’ve created have bad sides and most of the bad ones have good sides. Weylin, for example, could have been a perfectly decent fellow in different circumstances and with better role models.
The totally bad ones, like Zadar, I respect and understand, rather than sympathise with. Listening to right-wing radio in the USA, I’ve heard intelligent men articulately and persuasively flummox left-wing callers by explaining right-wing views that I find abhorrent. I don’t like these men much, but I do respect their minds and the way they make me challenge my own beliefs.
While I’m on the subject, I think that as soon as people define themselves as left wing or right wing, they put on blinkers and lose about twenty IQ points. Both sides have their good points and their really dumb ones. Right or wrong should be the focus, not right or left.
What were the challenges in bringing this book to life?
I was lucky not to have to work in an office or factory or similar while writing the book. I can’t write when I’ve spent most of the day working on something else – I just don’t have the brainpower or energy. Beyond that, I think the biggest challenge was the constant nagging suspicion that what I was writing was a stinking pile of crap that nobody will ever want to read. A book is a very long project and you’re very lucky if there are any points during it when someone says, “That’s good; you should carry on with it.” As I write, I’ve just finished the first draft of the second novel in the Iron Age trilogy. It’s been well over a thousand hours’ work, and nobody else has read a word of it. What if it’s rubbish and those hours were wasted? Thoughts like that might keep me awake at night.
What advice would you give to budding writers?
Go on a course. You may think it can’t possibly improve your marvellous writing and it may even stifle your wonderful style, and you can’t teach genius, but that’s all crap, and, if nothing else, a writing course will get you to start writing. That’s the other piece of advice – start.
What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading Dune by Frank Herbert, which I’d been meaning to do for ages. I’m enjoying it so far. I like older fantasy books (like the Conan series) because they’re great stories, but also because they tell you about the time that they’re written in. I’m also reading a book on North American history, because I’m planning to set my next book or series of books there (after the third Iron Age book). My book will be set in prehistoric times, but I’ll probably get some plot and character ideas from post-Columbian America. I find the USA fascinating and spend quite a lot of time there, usually staying in Las Vegas and taking photographs of the Mojave Desert. You can see these pics on my anonymous Twitter account @LasVegasHood (followers currently 52).
The people in the book have some quite modern characteristics. What made you write about them in this way?
I think there’s a bizarre kind of prejudice about people from the past. We think of them as less than us and one-dimensional. But, of course, they were just as full of playfulness, jealousies, wit, passion and so on as we are.
Women and men have something like equality in your version of the British Iron Age. Is that a nod to political correctness?
No. I don’t like tokenism. There are strong women in the book I guess because I’ve known a lot of strong women and I do believe that women are equal to men (and everybody’s equal to everybody, for that matter). I’m not trying to court a female readership or be right on. Similarly there’s a guy from Africa, not because I thought “ooh, better have a black bloke”, but because his origin is exotic and interesting, just like Chamanca’s (Spain), Lowa’s (Germany) and Felix’s (Italy).
Are you trying to get any messages across in your book?
The book is stuffed full of messages. If readers notice any of them, fine, if they don’t, also fine. There’s no need, for example, to work out that Tans Tali is an anagram of Atlantis or see the parallels I’m trying to draw between Atlantis, other flood stories and climate history to show that there were definitely vast, forgotten civilisations, with who knows what levels of technology and sophistication, which were obliterated ten thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age when the sea level rose three hundred feet …
What’s coming next for Dug, Lowa and Spring?
Their immediate problem is to consolidate their victory over Zadar. They’re going to face attacks by more powerful tribes in Britain, and something pretty terrifying that they’d never imagined from across the sea to the west. On top of that, they’ve got the invincible Romans to worry about. Ragnall’s life is going to change a lot, and some other characters from the first book will go to Gaul to see what they can do to halt Caesar’s relentless march north to Britain.