This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
I honestly can’t remember what inspired me to write about Alexander the Great. I think it was probably the Horrible Histories song, but I could be wrong about that. I suddenly just wanted to know everything there was to know about him, and to put it into story form. I actually started the story before I knew much about him and his campaigns at all so, still in its first draft condition, the opening chapter of the book has some rather hilarious mistakes and inferences. By the second chapter, I had eased into the story a little more and, by the fourth chapter, the research was there to support it too.
This story was unique among my historical fantasy because of the sheer quantity of research which I did for it. I devoured anything and everything I could find about Alexander the Great. There was a wonderful blog called The Second Achilles, and I spent hours poring over archived posts, reading as much as I could about different theories and stories about the great conqueror. The blog disappeared for a time, which was like a loss for me, until it suddenly reappeared one day! It’s the small things!!
When I first began to read about Alexander, I found that he was accompanied for a short time by a Hindu wise man, who was called Calanus by the Greeks. His actual name has been lost to time, and many believe he was named “Calanus” because that was the phonological sound of his greeting. Essentially, he was called, “Hello.” This gave rise to the story idea: that the adopted sister of Alexander the Great would become a kind of apprentice to Calanus, who had access to the Rite, the magic system which appears in many of my stories.
It became a complicated story, full of references to “real” events (note “real” in inverted commas – many of the stories we have about Alexander cannot be reliably fact-checked) which I think would be a great way of learning about history’s greatest conqueror – if I do say so myself!
For me, I cannot watch Oliver Stone’s biopic of the Macedonian king. I’ve seen part of it – namely (spoiler alert!) the part where Hephaestion dies, and it was an anathema to me. I could not believe that someone who professed to have read about Alexander could have had him ignoring the dying Hephaestion. In fact, the earliest sources suggest that Alexander’s grief at Hephaestion’s death was all the more acute because he was not there at the time.
At Christmas, Mum and Dad bought me an old film about Alexander the Great. It’s my intention to watch it at some point – probably while crafting in my bedroom. But it’s difficult to watch anything about Alexander, because he exists so visually for me, as a result of reading so much about him, then recreating him in the image I wanted.
One thing I do go back to repeatedly though, is the Horrible Histories song. The boyish arrogance which Ben Willbond manages to portray is utterly captivating, despite the fact that Willbond was 39 or 40 years old at the time. Alexander himself only lived to be 32 (in a society which had a good life expectancy).
And the downward glance from Laurence Rickard? That single shot created the entire character of Ptolemy for my novel: everything I needed in one look.
And this is why we should never underestimate the expertise of good children’s television or comic actors.
Post-script: Funnily enough, today (27th March 2025), I was covering a Humanities class at school and went into the classroom to discover they were learning about Alexander the Great! Sadly, they were only looking at the story of Heracles (Alexander claimed descent from Heracles through his father’s line) which allowed me to resist the temptation to go full Alexander-fangirl.
Later, a colleague inquired politely about what my classes had been like.
“They were learning about Alexander,” I replied.
“Alexander the Great,” came the response.
Well, yes, but his epithet goes without saying: Alexander was and always will be ALEXANDER. It is believed that every person who bears that name (including my brother!) is directly or indirectly named after Alexander the Great.
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