'Livia' is becoming an obsession!
Entry posted by The Augusta
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I read through my re-drafted draft of the re-drafted draft of Parts 1 and 2 of my Livia work-in-progress last night. To anyone who has not yet realised that I am a crazy aspiring novelist with a toxicity fetish, let me clear this up now. I have been drafting things for many years. I once got as far as sending something to Macmillan many years ago, to be told that I could definitely write and should choose a more modern subject as Rome was not the order of the day. Bugger 'em - I thought. So, they published Thomas Hardy - what do they know? 
However, given this vague praise from an actual publishing house that people have heard of, made me thrust out my chest and get on with it. So, a novel about Octavian's rise to power languished in my bedroom drawer for about 15 years! I had entitled it 'Imperium' (thank you Robert Harris - who does not let his titles rest in his drawers!). Then I took it out and added most of Gus' reign to it (down to banishment of Postumus) and entitled it 'Emperor' (thank you, Conn Iggulden!). I finally decided to scrap all that and make the bloody thing about Livia instead - and after all, she needs to speak to the world with her own voice for once. As yet I have no title - nor will I ever tempt fate by entitling it anything until it goes off on its long round of cruising for a customer. (Imperatrix sounds far too much like *or*!) So, let us just call it 'Livia' for now and have done! And there is a bonus for me - now that the POV has shifted to a lady, I don't have to write all the battle scenes from Grip and Gus' POV! (I can remember my very first Philippi took a week just to draft, and then I had to rewrite because I realised Brutus' lines were drawn up in the wrong order!) No - I'll leave the military stuff to Conn and others. Hats off to 'em! (I didn't do a bad Actium, as I seem to remember - perhaps I'm more nautical than I thought! - although I did chicken out a bit and have Cleo frantic on her flagship while Arruntius was lurking up her pretty little posterior and Lurius was lying on his oars! ) 
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Enough of such tomfoolery! I am now seriously trying to do our Livia some justice and was quite pleased with Parts 1 and 2 (down to marriage to T. Nero). But as all writers are supercritical of their own efforts, I found myself loving some of it, and hating other bits. Whole scenes need chopping, others need expanding. I need to tweak a bit here, and polish a bit there, while still trying to keep the pace of Part 1 going in an increasingly more political Part 2. I have enjoyed recreating just how devastating an effect the Proscriptions had on the nobles though, and there is a certain 'death' which happens to a purely fictional character but is part of my own story that I think goes quite well. And listen to this, folks - at last a novel/recreation or whatever you want to call it, that actually has a place for Salvidienus Rufus! (Not the nicest of guys, however.)
What I am trying to do in this work, seriously, is to show how the events of Liv's early life shaped her personality and character - into the woman she would become. (And no - it does not include poisoning!) Like all heroines she has flaws as well as virtues, otherwise she would not be real, but the process is proving to be very enjoyable. What I am most pleased with is that the woman emerging is telling her story with a mixture of humour, poignancy and downright matter-of-fact Roman hard-headedness, and still managing to be a lady into the bargain. I am intending to take the story to 35BC after the victory at Sicily when the tide really turned for that little blond thing she married and she was awarded her first statue and her person was made sacrosanct, which has a direct bearing on the way I have shaped the fictional account of her childhood, thus bringing the novel full circle.
For those who write (Skarr in particular) - there is a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing a character take shape into a full-blooded person from just a few scraps of historical data: Livia's father, for instance, has more or less run away with me and formed his own character. I intended him to be a cold fish, and he's turned out to be a complex, warm and honourable man who I will be sorry to part with. Her mother I have had to create almost from scratch, but I've had a lot of fun with our Alfidia. I shall be sorry to lose her too, and as we have nothing in our sources to say when, where or how she died, I may even change my mind yet about her end. My purely fictional characters are much easier to deal with as they only have constraints of historical context, not fact.
But it is definitely an obsession. When I don't write for a few days, I feel her watching me! It was her birthday recently - I churned out three whole chapters! She is here, and she is keeping an eye on me. I only hope I can do her justice. 
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