History as Seduction

 

Good evening my friends, welcome to tonight’s Militiverse chat. There’s always something bright and intoxicating about the beginning of March. It’s the start of Spring, at least it is in the Militiverse. The flowers are beginning to bloom, scent fills the air, there is a giddiness one can’t describe but can certainly feel it. Almost as if being a child once more and waiting for the school holidays to come, and freedom to enjoy the long days ahead.

History too, is like that, one passage read about an era, maybe twenty years ago, or on the social outlets, a piece appears around a movie, or a band from 1985, and you are back there, remembering it. But can you trust a memory?

Memory edits. It softens edges. Turns blood into sepia. Let’s discuss the seduction that history plays on us, how the research a writer does leads one down a silken rabbit hole and why we get lost in it. 

The First Glance Across the Centuries

The first time I read a historical account, that didn’t feel like a history lesson but it read like a fantastical novel, with characters who moved like epic figures, honourable on both sides of the conflict. The Gallic leader Vercingetorix, and his people as they defended Gaul from the Romans.  The book? Caesar’s own account of his conquest of Gaul. It drew me in, and I couldn’t get enough. The next works that seduced me were accounts of the Mycenaeans, again, historical accounts were not very easy to come by, but what I did read brought me back to the time, to the place. 

I have always been fascinated by history. Ancient history in particular.  So, when reading books about my heroes, like Seneca, Cicero, Emperor Titus, the list is endless. Research gets left behind and I lose myself in reading about their lives. 

A favourite book that I reread every so often was ‘The last days of Pompeii,’ by Edward Bulwer-Lytton from 1834. The vivid descriptions, the characters, they come alive on the page and I am in Pompeii. 

Living Among Ghosts

It’s so easy to become emotionally attached to an era, a time in history that is impossible to ignore. Much of history is violent. It is impossible to imagine what life was truly like, yet we romanticise it anyway. 

When I first conceptualised the Tempus Militibus Series, I knew what I wanted to write about, so the series encompassed all of my interests, my love of ancient history, philosophy, ancient languages, and of course travel. 

There is an emotional cost to inhabiting another era. The more I read the more engrossed that I became in the history of the time. I hungered for more knowledge of the period and the place I was researching. 

I am a very visual person, I see my characters, situations, and places vividly. So, when I was writing the scenes from the past, I found myself living there, that is wondering what life was really like, visualising it, but not with twenty-first-century eyes, but with the eyes of someone who belonged there, not only to the land, but to the century itself. Which is why my library has grown substantially with research books and materials.

History, in this way, it becomes almost like a lover. It invites you closer. It whispers truths. It flatters you with discovery. And yet it never reveals everything. There are gaps, silences, fragments lost to time. You are always left wanting more.

Perhaps that is the true seduction.

Accuracy Versus Atmosphere

Historical fiction is an equal balance of accuracy and atmosphere. The same applies to writing historical and Gothic fantasy. Last year, I spent quite some time in Ephesus, in Leto, and Knossos, these places are of immense importance in my Militiverse. Walking where the ancients walked was extraordinary. Seeing their streets, their temples, not as an illustration in a history book but as a physical space. That changed something inside of me.

I couldn’t help but be in awe of Ephesus, the magnificence of the library, the amphitheatre. The engineering of the sewer and water systems. Also to learn that Ephesus was, in its heyday, a harbour city, it was just mind-blowing, because now it is nowhere near a port.

Details like this don’t become footnotes. It becomes atmosphere in the story. It grounds the imagination into something tangible.

That is where accuracy provides the structure and atmosphere provides the soul.

Closing the Archive Door

Sometimes it is hard to know when enough research has been done, and if what you have discovered is enough for the story. That is the obsession of research. 

As a reader, I love to get lost in a good book, but when I am in the middle of a huge and complex series like the Militiverse, my reading tends to be for research and not pleasure.

That’s when as a writer, I must trust that the foundations are strong enough. That the atmosphere has been absorbed. That certain truths about era have been honoured, even if every detail hasn’t been mastered.  

Only then can the pen meet the paper. 

One could spend a lifetime reading and still never master all there is to know. History is too vast to be conquered. Which is why my friends, sometimes the writer has to close the door on research. 

Once my book is written, I reread the historical books, not as a researcher but as a reader, hungry for more. The seduction continues just differently.

Writing historical gothic fantasy allows me to inhabit both worlds. One honours history, its truths, and it places the characters within the pulse of it all.  To walk through an epoch and still shape the story.

So, my friends, thank you for spending this evening with me, I hope that this conversation encourages you to look at history not as something that’s cold, and distant but instead as something living.

Something that blooms each time we open a book and we dare to step inside. 

Anna.

 
Photos used are from A D McCabe's own personal collection.