Today for #HistFicThursdays, I am delighted to once again be teaming up with The Coffee Pot Book Club , this time to share an excerpt from SP Somtow 's fantastic new book Nero and Sporus ! First of all, let's meet the book... Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters. The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena. Nero and Sporus is available on #KindleUnlimited via this link . And here's an excerpt to whet your appetite: I suppose we were anxious to see who the surprise competitor would be, but no one was as surprise...
I've just got back from a week away hunting for ancestors. Yes, this might not be everyone's idea of a fun holiday, but Judith and I adventured around many churchyards and churches, looking for any names on stones or monuments which matched those already in our family tree. As well as taking photos of graves and monumental inscriptions, we also took pictures of the fonts where our ancestors were baptised.
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| The font in Aldeburgh, where countless members of our family were baptised |
But one of my favourite discoveries was when we visited a library and raided their Local History section. In one of the books we found the most random section about Thomas Hudson, a local tailor, who used to work sitting cross-legged on the floor. It's a trivial thing but, at once, I felt I knew him better. These apparently throwaway facts take a name on the page - or stone - and turn them into a real character.
Ancestors are a great place to start with character-building. My most recent writing has been Mariner Hawkes: Charity Boy, built on a number of people from the Aldeburgh branch of my own family tree. From research we've done into our family, I had a pretty good idea of what had been expected from the young men of the family, most of whom were educated at the Greenwich Hospital School (where the title "charity boy" comes from), and then either into the navies, any branch of what later became the Coastguard Service, or as a Trinity Pilot.
This isn't the only ancestor-inspired character I've inserted into my writing. Everyone comes from a family of intriguing individuals. Have a go at uncovering your own family tree and find the ancestor whose story you'd most like to bring to life. They could go on to be the star of their own adventure, or remain as a peripheral character whose full significance only you will know.
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